Abstract:
The past three decades have witnessed the emergence of cryptography as a field for active public research. A consequence of this is that, in addition to its traditional role of providing secret communications between parties sharing a secret key, cryptography today offers a wide variety of other capabilities such as public-key cryptosystems, digital signatures, secret sharing, anonymous transactions and subliminal communications. Governments have been prone to place curbs on the use of cryptography to the dismay of privacy advocates and the gulf of disagreement between these camps has been widened by the events of September 11.

In this lecture, the main technical capabilities of cryptography will be described and illustrated. Following this, some opinions will be offered as to which controls on cryptography are practical and reasonable and which are misguided.

Biography:
James L. Massey served on the faculties of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana (1962-1977), the University of California, Los Angeles (1977-1980), and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH),Zürich (1980-1998), where he now hold emeritus status. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at the University of Lund, Sweden.

He has served the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory as Editor and as Associate Editor for Algebraic Coding and the Journal of Cryptology as an Associate Editor. He is a past President of the IEEE Information Theory Society and of the International Association for Cryptologic Research.

Massey was a founder of Codex Corporation (later a division of Motorola) and of Cylink Corporation, Santa Clara, California.

His awards include the 1988 Shannon Award of the IEEE Information Theory Society, the 1992 IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal "for contributions to the theory and practical implementation of forward-error-correcting codes, multi-user communications, and cryptographic systems; and for excellence in engineering education", the l987 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award (joint with P. Mathys) for the "most outstanding paper reporting original work in the Transactions, Journals, and Magazines of IEEE Societies or in the Proceedings of the IEEE", and the 1999 Marconi International Fellowship. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences, a member emeritus of the U. S. National Academy of Engineering, an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Science, and a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.