On Post-Modern Cryptography

This essay relates to a recent article of Koblitz&Menezes that “criticizes several typical ‘provable security’ results” and argues that the “theorem-proof paradigm of theoretical mathematics is often of limited relevance” to cryptography. Although it should be obvious that these claims are utterly wrong, we undertake articulating this triviality. In particular, we point out some of the fundamental philosophical flaws that underly the said article and some of its misconceptions regarding theoretical research in Cryptography in the last quarter of a century.