Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Cryptography

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[edit] Cryptography

Self-nom. We've worked on this article to make it more of a balance between modern and historical crypto, and to provide good references. It's challenging in a summary article like this. The article is stable; there was once a battle over the user of "cipher" vs. "cypher" but it has stabilized. I'm looking forward to specific comments especially so that this article can become featured. Previous FAC: Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Cryptography/archive1. Mangojuice^talk 20:49, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

• Minor objectionSupport - Good, comprehensive article, but I think a (sub)section on "cryptography in the everyday world" (mentioned in the lead) would be a good addition to "Cryptography and Modern Society" which deals mostly with legal issues. In addition, you may want to check parts of the text for an overkill of terms and abbreviations that may be deterring to the non-expert reader - especially "Symmetric-key cryptography". Taking a few extra words or sentences to explain would be useful there. Jeronimo 21:53, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

• I tried to pare down the Symmetric-key crypto section for readability. Will address the rest later. Mangojuice^talk 21:20, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

• I couldn't come up with much to say on "cryptography in the everday world" that was more than a list of things that use cryptography. I retitled that section "Legal issues involving cryptography" to be more accurate, and I expanded a bit about crypto in everyday life in the lead instead. The only other idea I had to address this would be to have a section on cryptography in popular culture, but in my experience that kind of section becomes a nasty cruft-magnet. Mangojuice^talk 17:20, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

• I can see this is difficult. Perhaps you can give a few (short) examples of uses of cryptography such as mentioned in the lead section - what kind of encryption is used in e-mail or ATM machines? Can they be cracked? Note that this doesn't necessarily have to be full section - it could also be a few sentences spread over the article at appropriate places. But maybe it's just not suited for an article - I'll think about it as well. Jeronimo 21:20, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

• I'll see what I can do. The answer to your question is, unfortunately, too complicated to answer fully, but we could probably have simple statements like "AES is used in some ATM machines," without further explanation. Mangojuice^talk 14:22, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
• Okay, I salted the article with some references back to everyday life, and applications average people will be familiar with like secure email and ATM machines. (BTW, I was wrong, AES seems to be totally absent from ATMs, they all still use triple-DES.) Mangojuice^talk 20:48, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

Supporting now. Like the new pictures as well, BTW. Jeronimo 06:21, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

• Comment. Remove excessive links to non-full dates. You can find these by searching for '19' (or '[[19' in edit mode). Alternatively, it is easy with a single click on a 'dates' tab in edit mode. You can then accept or reject the changes offered and/or do more editing before pressing 'Save'. Simply copy the entire contents of User:Bobblewik/monobook.js to your own monobook. Then follow the instructions in your monobook to clear the cache (i.e. press Ctrl-Shift-R in Firefox, or Ctrl-F5 in IE) before it will work. bobblewik 10:35, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

• Addressed. Mangojuice^talk 18:29, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

There is still one unnecessary date link. Look for '19' as before and you will find '19th century'. bobblewik 21:56, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

• Addressed. I refactored this here, as it wasn't a response to the comment it was below. (Hope no one minds.) Mangojuice^talk 21:59, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I don't you moving the comment. I am grateful for your efforts in this article. Keep up the good work. bobblewik 22:39, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

• Support. Rlevse 17:06, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

• Looks quite good to me; a few minor comments after a quick read. I'll try to come back for a detailed reading. Schutz 16:46, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
  • In section "Modern cryptography": The modern field of cryptography can be broken down into several areas of study. The following are the main ones, but they are not the only ones. Is it possible to refer to another article that would give more information about what the others ones may be ?
  • "Legal issues": This section is very US-centric. France used to be one of the rare western countries to strictly limit the actual use of cryptography, and it may be worth a mention. Also, the Wassenaar Arrangement should probabaly be there somewhere, beings the main international agreement controlling the export of cryptographic material.
  • Also, the last sentence of the section, about the EFF, is a bit short to deserve a paragraph by itself. It may be worth giving a short list of what the EFF achieved (or did not manage to achieve) ?
  • Given that this is the main page about a relatively general topic, it'd be nice to have a "Further reading" section which would indicate a few general books on the topic
    • (1): Perhaps that sentence should be revised. Basically, areas that are in any way recognized as an "area" are all subareas of the ones described. For instance, e-commerce is one area, but it's basically a subarea of the protocols area. (2) good point, I'll do my best to address it. (3): I think that gets a little off-topic. There's a lot the EFF has done, and it's covered pretty well in the EFF article. Maybe we should change that to a "see also"? (4): Good point. This used to be there, but then some of those books got used as references; will do. Mangojuice^talk 17:27, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

For EFF, I guess it's all or nothing: either removing the mention altogether (which I am ok with), or replacing it with a more detailed paragraph. One more comment: I was quite interested in the "Cryptography in the modern world" discussion above, and I think it is a valid point: as a reader of an encyclopedia, I think I would expect to learn how this topic is relevant to my everyday life, by mentioning topics such as smart cards (with a picture ?), SSL (with a picture of the yellow padlock in a random web browser ?). Schutz 21:49, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

I moved the EFF link into the See Also section, to avoid these issues. I have now updated the legal section to cover international law some more; the US is still covered most, but that's appropriate as the US is where much crypto comes from. I added a couple more pics, as a way to be more friendly to a non-expert reader, and added some mentions back to everyday life. It's not really feasible to fully discuss how crypto impacts everyday life, because there are too many things, and it gets even more technical to get into it properly. So there are a few toss-off mentions of other things, now, for non-expert readers to relate to. I also addressed (1) and (4). Mangojuice^talk 20:48, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

Support now. Schutz 21:15, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

• Comment. This could be expanded: the history section could use the names of some famous cryptographers, and I was somewhat suprised not to see a link to Cryptonomicon, probably the most famous recent book (part fiction, part math) related to cryptography.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 16:37, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

Link to Cryptonomicon is there now, in the new "further reading" section. (Just finished reading it yesterday, funny coincidence.) There actually are many names of famous cryptographers in the article; not as many in the History section, but still several there. The names of modern cryptographers appear in the Modern Cryptography section. Mangojuice^talk 20:48, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

• Comment. The caption for the first picture in the article could be improved by providing more detail - specifically, the purpose of the Lorenz cipher machine, its time period (i.e. world war II) and a link to the Lorenz article. Jazriel 15:22, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

Addressed. Mangojuice^talk 16:28, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

• Comment: "It's a common fallacy that every encryption method can be broken by someone, even if we include intelligence agencies such as the NSA." -- the sentence is not clear. also, "exponential" in the same para shoulb be wikilinked. There are also a whole bunch of minor punctuation problems, like two fullstops at the end of a sentence.--ppm 17:45, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

Addressed. I also took a pass through the article generally, and cleaned up some awkward sentences, and tightened things up a little. Mangojuice^talk 20:04, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

• More comments

1. "ie, a key" -- what's the wiki rule: is it ie or i.e.?
2. "Cryptography is also recommended in the Kama Sutra as a way for lovers to communicate without discovery." -- the Kama Sutra article seems to not contain anything of the kind, hence a reference is needed.
3. "In modern techniques, a cipher is only one part of a cryptosystem, a set of algorithms, protocols, and operating procedures for encryption and decryption that use the cipher as one of the cooperating elements." -- the sentence is saying the same thing twice.
4. Enigma and other german machines are mentioned, but what about the breaking of them? the article Alan Turing has some pertinent info.
5. Is it possible to incorporate some more non-US info in the "Legal issues" part? Alternatively, the chapter can be made shorter and can have an separate article .
6. I know its hard to cover everything, but I would like to ask editors to consider a few more lines on more advance stuff like secure multiparty stuff -- maybe Yao's result on millionaires problem?

--ppm 00:18, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

• Changed your comments to a numbered list. 1: I.e. is more proper, addressed. 2: I believe that's in the Kahn book (reference at the end of the paragraph), but I found a specific reference; addressed. 3: I see some awkwardness there, addressed now. 5: The section addresses the laws of many nations, but more weight is given to the US. This is appropriate, because the US was the battleground that received by far the most attention. Part of the reason is that the US was the source of most of the crypto and crypto research at the time. I think the current distribution is appropriate. 4: I expanded the caption under the Enigma picture. The text where Enigma is introduced is more about the use of mechanical aids in cryptography, so it doesn't flow as well there. 6: I think not. The article is already bordering on too long, and secure multiparty computation is very hard to explain to a lay audience. This article is, after all, supposed to be a high-level survey. And that result is no more interesting than several dozen others I could mention. Mangojuice^talk 05:04, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

• Support now. nice article.--ppm 18:42, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

• Support. A tangled topic, with connections to almost everything, but this is currently a satisfactory attempt at an overview. And has been improved by the changes provoked by the FA process. Worth featuring. ww 19:24, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

• In the interests of full disclosure, ww has been a frequent editor of the Cryptography article. Still, ww has high standards! Mangojuice^talk 19:45, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I was the nominator of this article the last time it was up for FA status and withdrew it after some extensive, and very bold, revisions by another editor. I haven't had much to do with it since then. Perhaps a few of my edits survive in the current version. ww 08:03, 2 July 2006 (UTC)