Paper 2023/715

Research Philosophy of Modern Cryptography: Is It Possible to Capture All Research Motivations in Cryptography Papers?

Abstract

Proposing novel cryptography schemes (e.g., encryption, signatures, and protocols) is one of the main research goals in modern cryptography. In this paper, based on more than 800 research papers since 1976 that we have surveyed, we introduce the research philosophy, namely ``above" and ``beyond", of cryptography behind these papers. The ``above" refers to contributing more benefits in the newly proposed schemes which are usually explained with research motivations in academic papers; while the ``beyond" refers to contributing novel knowledge that the human has not yet mastered towards that kind of benefit. In this work, we concentrate on the ``above" part and aim to systematically survey the benefits of proposing new schemes, assuming that there is already one scheme proposed for a cryptography notion. We have categorized proposed benefits into 3 ways, 6 types, and 17 areas. As examples, we introduce 40 research strategies within these areas, each illustrated as ``From less-adj (in the first scheme) To more-adj (in the second scheme)", where ``adj" here refers to an adjective word representing a positive result in some sense, such as efficient, secure, traceable, and flexible. The introduced research strategies have covered most of the benefits of those schemes published in top-tier cryptography conferences.