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@kennwhite
Created July 30, 2021 19:07
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Not many papers share a critical view of the cryptography field, and when such papers are published they tend to be dismissed as "extreme opinions". But not talking about potential deficiencies is harmful for everyone on the long run, even if many actors' self-interest is the status quo (example: USSR). So here's a list of crypto papers and essays not purely technical, sometimes called "controverial", in arbitrary order (please send suggestions of missing entries):

Rogaway - The moral character of cryptographic work - https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral.pdf

Bernstein - Non-uniform cracks in the concrete: the power of free precomputation - http://cr.yp.to/nonuniform/nonuniform-20130914.pdf

Koblitz - Another look at "provable security" - https://eprint.iacr.org/2004/152.pdf

Koblitz - The uneasy relationship between mathematics and cryptography - https://www.ams.org/notices/200708/tx070800972p.pdf

Mickens - This world of ours - https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thisworldofours.pdf

Aumasson - Too much crypto - https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1492.pdf

Goldwasser, Tauman Kalai - Cryptographic assumptions: A position paper - https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/907.pdf

Damgård - A “proof-reading” of some issues in cryptography - https://users-cs.au.dk/~ivan/positionpaper.pdf

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