The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

In fact the process can be swapped around, so that the private key is used for encrypting and the public key is used for decrypting. This mode of encryption is usually ignored because it offers no security. If Alice uses her private key to encrypt a message to Bob, then everybody can decrypt it because everybody has Alice’s public key. However, thi

According to Major General Howard Conner, “without the Navajos, the marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.”

Built into the wall was a stone bearing a remarkable set of inscriptions: the same piece of text had been inscribed on the stone three times, in Greek, demotic and hieroglyphics. The Rosetta Stone, as it became known, appeared to be the equivalent of a cryptanalytic crib, just like the cribs that helped the codebreakers at Bletchley Park to break i

The spread of the Christian Church was responsible for the extinction of the Egyptian scripts, outlawing their use in order to eradicate any link with Egypt’s pagan past.

Furthermore, quantum cryptography has an additional benefit: it provides a way for Alice and Bob to find out if Eve is eavesdropping. Eve’s presence on the line becomes apparent because every time that she measures a photon, she risks altering it, and these alterations become obvious to Alice and Bob.

The Swiss experiment with optic fibers demonstrates that it would be feasible to build a system that permits secure communication between financial institutions within a single city.

At the age of just forty-two, one of the true geniuses of cryptanalysis committed suicide.

Colossus, as with everything else at Bletchley Park, was destroyed after the war, and those who worked on it were forbidden to talk about it. When Tommy Flowers was ordered to dispose of the Colossus blueprints, he obediently took them down to the boiler room and burned them. The plans for the world’s first computer were lost forever. This secrecy

In America there are no restrictions on key size, but U.S. software companies are still not allowed to export Web products that offer strong encryption. Hence, browsers exported to the rest of the world can handle only short keys, and thus offer only moderate security. In fact, if Alice is in London buying a book from a company in Chicago, her Inte