Crypto Wars: 2000 Years of Cipher Evolution
- ISBN-10
- 1539079570
- ISBN-13
- 9781539079576
- Series
- Crypto Wars
- Pages
- 92
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2016-10-31
- Author
- Ralph Simpson
Description
The battle of wits between codemakers and codebreakers has been the driving force for innovation in cipher technology for centuries. Every time the codemakers invented the next advance in cipher technology, the codebreakers would come up with an ingenious way to break that cipher. This book explores the technology of these crypto devices and the dramatic consequences of codebreaking to history. The science of cryptology is by necessity shrouded in secrecy. As the veil is lifted on these secrets, often many decades or centuries after the fact, we gain a greater understanding of how codebreaking resulted in dramatic consequences for history. As a result, we are often forced to re-examine and rewrite that history. Also, the invention and inventors of many cipher technologies are kept secret for many years. Examples of cipher technologies traditionally credited to the wrong inventors include: the Enigma machine, the Vigen�re disk, the one-time pad, the Jefferson wheel cypher, the Wheatstone cipher and even modern public key encryption! As an example of history being rewritten, the knowledge of the Allies breaking the Nazi Enigma code in WW2 was kept secret for 29 years, despite over 15,000 people working to break that code. In today's world of WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden and the internet, it is hard to fathom how this bombshell story was kept secret for so long. Now, the impact of the Allies breaking the Enigma code is better understood. By some estimates, it shortened the war by two years, saving millions of lives. Our third president, Thomas Jefferson, invented an innovative cipher device which he called his "wheel cypher" in the mid-1790s. This cipher was re-invented by the French 100 years later and again by the US Army 130 years after Jefferson's invention. The US Army invention in 1922 was coincidentally the same year it was first discovered in the writings of Jefferson in the Library of Congress. Now even credit for the 1922 re-invention has been rewritten. Instead of Joseph O. Mauborgne inventing this in 1922, credit now goes to Parker Hitt, who invented the wheel and strip form in 1912. It was originally thought the electric rotor ciphers were invented independently by 4 inventors in 4 countries near the end of WW1. It wasn't until 2003 that it was discovered this pivotal innovation was actually invented several years earlier, in 1915, by two Dutch naval officers. Now history has been rewritten on the invention of the most infamous cipher machine of them all, with credit going to Theo van Hengel and Rudolf Spengler. The only cipher that is mathematically proven to be completely unbreakable is the one-time pad. Even this perfect cipher has been broken, however, when not used correctly. This caused historic consequences for Germany and for the Soviet Union. Once again, this cipher technology was credited to the wrong inventors for almost 100 years. It was thought to be invented by Gilbert Vernam and Joseph Mauborgne in 1919, but a 2011 discovery proved it was published in a code book by a Sacramento banker, Frank Miller, 37 years earlier in 1882. When cryptanalysis fails, espionage is the favored and logical next step in the battle of wits. The US National Security Agency "back-door" into the Hagelin cipher gave the US an open book into the military, diplomatic and government secrets of over 100 countries for four decades. This represents one of the greatest stings in history! Recent news of wholesale gathering of phone metadata by the NSA on hundreds of millions of people captivated and appalled people worldwide, but even more consequential is the fact they broke into public key encryption, by using backdoors in popular software programs and by sheer brute force computing. The battle of wits between codemakers and codebreakers continues to escalate and is guaranteed to produce more ingenious technologies and interesting rewritings of history for years to come.
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Other editions
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- 2021-07-03
- 264 pages
- Ebook
- Kogan Page Publishers