  Cryptography is a theory of secret functions. Category theory is a general
theory of functions. Cryptography has reached a stage where its structures
often take several pages to define, and its formulas sometimes run from page to
page. Category theory has some complicated definitions as well, but one of its
specialties is taming the flood of structure. Cryptography seems to be in need
of high level methods, whereas category theory always needs concrete
applications. So why is there no categorical cryptography? One reason may be
that the foundations of modern cryptography are built from probabilistic
polynomial-time Turing machines, and category theory does not have a good
handle on such things. On the other hand, such foundational problems might be
the very reason why cryptographic constructions often resemble low level
machine programming. I present some preliminary explorations towards
categorical cryptography. It turns out that some of the main security concepts
are easily characterized through the categorical technique of *diagram
chasing*, which was first used Lambek's seminal `Lecture Notes on Rings and
Modules'.
