Phillip Rogaway, professor in the University of California, Davis Department of Computer Science will give a seminar at the University of Kentucky on March 23 at 4:00 p.m. in the James F. Hardymon Theatre at the Davis Marksbury Building.
Rogaway studied cryptography at MIT, then worked as a security architect for IBM before joining the faculty at the University of California, Davis in 1994. Co-inventor of “practice-oriented provable security,” Rogaway’s work seeks to meld cryptographic theory and cryptographic practice in a mutually beneficial way. Beyond his technical work, Rogaway is also interested in social and ethical problems associated to technology.
The title of Rogaway’s seminar is “Moral Character of Cryptographic Work.” The abstract is below.
Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what. This makes cryptography an inherently political tool, and it confers on the field an intrinsically moral dimension. The Snowden revelations motivate a reassessment of the political and moral positioning of cryptography. They lead one to ask if our inability to effectively address mass surveillance constitutes a failure of our field. I believe that it does. I call for a community-wide effort to develop more effective means to resist mass surveillance. I plead for a reinvention of our disciplinary culture to attend not only to puzzles and math, but, also, to the societal implications of our work.