Cryptography is mathematics, and mathematics doesn’t lend itself to violence. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:
I am no fan of violent revolution, yet I have to admit that John Kennedy had a point when he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” The forces that drive revolutions push themselves to the surface one way or another. If they can find a peaceful path, they have a chance to transform the world slowly and beneficially. If they are repressed, violence occurs sooner or later.
Entrenched regimes, however, all but never give up power willingly. It makes no difference whether the regime is a monarchy, democracy, theocracy, republic or whatever. Once entrenched, power-holders fight until they can’t. This is not a function of a system; it is a function of power itself, and the humans who become addicted to it. And so we’ve seen a long succession of violent revolutions.
The good news of our time – the transformative news of our time – is this: Cryptography displaces violence. However much cryptography we use, change will require that much less violence. And there is a very good reason for this: Cryptography is impervious to weapons.
Cryptography, after all, boils down to math, and you can’t put a bullet through a math problem. Well-applied cryptography, then, is immune to the usual applications of power.
And please consider the awesome power of cryptography. In a very common application, it is roughly 2 to the 100th power times harder to decrypt a message than it is to encrypt it, unless you have the key.
In other words, to blow through cryptography, you have to guess the correct answer among 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376 choices. This isn’t just theoretical; it’s the kind of encryption we’ve been using in everyday life for many years.
