Bruno Buchberger’s algorithm: Gröbner bases and applications (1998) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Bruno Buchberger’s algorithm: Gröbner bases and applications (1998) [pdf]

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55 pointsboshomi4 comments

When doing some research for a final project about using Grobner bases for cryptography, I came across an interesting paper titled aptly titled "Why You Cannot Even Hope To Use Grobner Bases in Public-Key Cryptography: An Open Letter to A Scientist Who Failed and a Challenge to Those Who Have Not Yet Failed".

[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/aab4/9f22ed522d16111eca29ae...]

Not only is this paper written in a very wry style not super common in math papers (it is addressed to "Dear Deluded Author"), it seems all the authors are pseudonyms: Boo Barkee, Deh Cac Can, Julia Ecks, Theo Moriarty, and R.F. Ree. And it includes a large quote from Trithemius' (a 15th century occultist who wrote several books on magic that were actually "encrypted" books on early cryptography in disguise.) Steganographia in the abstract.

When I tried to do some research on this mysterious paper I couldn't really find any references or explanations for who these people are, where they are from, or why this wrote this paper. The only thing I could come up with is "Boo Barkee" sounds a lot like "Bourbaki", the last name of a pseudonymous group of French mathematicians [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki].

All this to say, does anyone here know about this paper or who the authors are? Why is it all so mysterious? Is there supposed to be hidden steganography'd messages inside the paper itself? Are the other authors' names also references?

As for my final project, I ended up not being able to figure out a way to use Grobner bases for cryptography.

“The name of Boo Barkee, who lived in Ithaca, NY, is known for several papers he published alone (Barkee 1988) and with his colleagues (Barkee, Dennis, and Wang 1990, Barkee, Can, Ecks, Moriarty, and Ree 1994). As one can read in the work of Kreuzer and Robbiano (2005): [...] The truth is that Boo Barkee was a dog belonging to Moss Sweedler, who while writing his paper on cryptography decided to use his dog’s name as a pseudonym. At least two of Barkee’s coauthors were using fake names too: Deh Cac Can was a pen name of D. Naccache, and Theo Moriarty was in fact Teo Mora. Julia Ecks and Richard Francis Ree have not disclosed their identities” — https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00283-017-9763-...

Thanks for the reference. Haven't looked into this in a few years, cool to see something has shown up about it now. I guess Sweedler was just having some fun then?

Still curious about the Trithemius quote and if it has any particular relevance to the paper.

Any context for why it appeared just now?

On a personal note, it is almost eerie that it appeared just as I finished a week in Chile at a workshop [1] looking into Buchberger's algorithm and the connections between Gröbner bases and bit complexity of proofs via sums of squares [2, 3].

[1]: https://sites.google.com/view/vverdugo/events/hierarchies-an...

[2]: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~odonnell/papers/sos-automatizability...

[3]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.05139

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