1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
6758
6759
6760
6761
6762
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| ad68d3f | When Hermann Goring visited Warsaw in 1934, he was totally unaware of the fact that his communications were being intercepted and deciphered. As he and other German dignitaries laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier next to the offices of the Biuro Szyfrow, Rejewski could stare down at them from his window, content in the knowledge that he could read their most secret communications. | Simon Singh | ||
| ecfa2f8 | the enemy of security: repetition leads to patterns, and cryptanalysts thrive on patterns. | Simon Singh | ||
| ec83a01 | By depriving Rejewski of the keys, Langer believed he was preparing him for the inevitable time when the keys would no longer be available. He knew that if war broke out it would be impossible for Schmidt to continue to attend covert meetings, and Rejewski would then be forced to be self-sufficient. Langer thought that Rejewski should practice self-sufficiency in peacetime, as preparation for what lay ahead. | Simon Singh | ||
| 26e46e4 | quantum cryptography is a system that ensures the security of a message by making it hard for Eve to read accurately a communication between Alice and Bob. Furthermore, if Eve tries to eavesdrop then Alice and Bob will be able to detect her presence. Quantum cryptography therefore allows Alice and Bob to exchange and agree upon a onetime pad in complete privacy, and thereafter they can use this as a key to encrypt a message. | Simon Singh | ||
| 596e846 | Babbage's successful cryptanalysis of the Vigenere cipher was probably achieved in 1854, soon after his spat with Thwaites, but his discovery went completely unrecognized because he never published it. The discovery came to light only in the twentieth century, when scholars examined Babbage's extensive notes. In the meantime, his technique was independently discovered by Friedrich Wilhelm Kasiski, a retired officer in the Prussian army. Eve.. | Simon Singh | ||
| e9c24aa | the development of a fully operational quantum computer would imperil our personal privacy, destroy electronic commerce and demolish the concept of national security. A quantum computer would jeopardize the stability of the world. | Simon Singh | ||
| 9298a35 | It is quite possible that British Intelligence demanded that Babbage keep his work secret, thus providing them with a nine-year head start over the rest of the world. | Simon Singh | ||
| 9e42146 | French listening posts learned to recognize a radio operator's fist. Once encrypted, a message is sent in Morse code, as a series of dots and dashes, and each operator can be identified by his pauses, the speed of transmission, and the relative lengths of dots and dashes. A fist is the equivalent of a recognizable style of handwriting. | Simon Singh | ||
| 3933961 | Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were guilty of unjustified wiretaps, and President John F. Kennedy conducted dubious wiretaps in the first month of his presidency. | Simon Singh | ||
| ca3f16c | During a security briefing at the White House, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld breaks some tragic news: "Mr President, three Brazilian soldiers were killed yesterday while supporting U.S. troops." "My God!" shrieks President George W. Bush, and he buries his head in his hands. He remains stunned and silent for a full minute. Eventually, he looks up, takes a deep breath, and asks Rumsfeld: "How many is a brazillion?" | Simon Singh | ||
| 50ee699 | The three Britons had to sit back and watch as their discoveries were rediscovered by Diffie, Hellman, Merkle, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman over the next three years. | Simon Singh | ||
| 176e40d | Chinese wrote messages on fine silk, which was then scrunched into a tiny ball and covered in wax. The messenger would then swallow the ball of wax. | Simon Singh | ||
| a08cf13 | He was a rather quirky worker, and he didn't really fit into the day-to-day business of GCHQ. But in terms of coming up with new ideas he was quite exceptional. You had to sort through some rubbish sometimes, but he was very innovative and always willing to challenge the orthodoxy. | Simon Singh | ||
| cf6eb66 | The first microdot to be spotted by the FBI was in 1941, following a tip-off that the Americans should look for a tiny gleam from the surface of a letter, indicative of smooth film. | Simon Singh | ||
| f72689e | We would be in real trouble if everybody in GCHQ was like him, but we can tolerate a higher proportion of such people than most organizations. We put up with a number of people like him. Figure 66 James Ellis. (photo credit 6.4) One of Ellis's greatest qualities was his breadth of knowledge. | Simon Singh | ||
| db93dd4 | first ever military cryptographic device, the Spartan scytale, dating back to the fifth century B.C. The scytale is a wooden staff around which a strip of leather or parchment is wound, | Simon Singh | ||
| 3d5b34e | The German military were equally unenthusiastic, because they were oblivious to the damage caused by their insecure ciphers during the Great War. For example, they had been led to believe that the Zimmermann telegram had been stolen by American spies in Mexico, and so they blamed that failure on Mexican security. They still did not realize that the telegram had in fact been intercepted and deciphered by the British, and that the Zimmermann .. | Simon Singh | ||
| de4b80d | Because a quantum computer deals with 1's and 0's that are in a quantum superposition, they are called quantum bits, or qubits (pronounced "cubits"). The advantage of qubits becomes even clearer when we consider more particles." | Simon Singh | ||
| 06d7998 | diagonally polarized photons are in a quantum quandary when confronted by a vertical Polaroid filter. | Simon Singh | ||
| c0903d2 | half of them at random will be blocked, and half will pass through, and those that do pass through will be reoriented with a vertical polarization. | Simon Singh | ||
| 159507c | significance of the key, as opposed to the algorithm, is an enduring principle of cryptography. It was definitively stated in 1883 by the Dutch linguist Auguste Kerckhoffs von Nieuwenhof in his book La Cryptographie militaire: "Kerckhoffs' Principle: The security of a cryptosystem must not depend on keeping secret the crypto-algorithm. The security depends only on keeping secret the key." | Simon Singh | ||
| 2c990f8 | 250 qubits, it is possible to represent roughly 1075 combinations, which is greater than the number of atoms in the universe. If it were possible to achieve the appropriate superposition with 250 particles, then a quantum computer could perform 1075 simultaneous computations, | Simon Singh | ||
| 0e82f83 | The letters a and l are the most common in Arabic, partly because of the definite article al-, whereas the letter j appears only a tenth as frequently. | Simon Singh | ||
| efa15ae | the Arab scholars were also capable of destroying ciphers. They in fact invented cryptanalysis, the science of unscrambling a message without knowledge of the key. | Simon Singh | ||
| d845320 | What is the least number of weights that can be used on a set of scales to weigh any whole number of kilograms from 1 to 40? | Simon Singh | ||
| 25807dc | For decades, ENIAC, not Colossus, was considered the mother of all computers. | Simon Singh | ||
| 4d9df00 | NSA employs more mathematicians, buys more computer hardware, and intercepts more messages than any other organization in the world. It is the world leader when it comes to snooping. | Simon Singh | ||
| 6a1cea9 | In the 1970s, banks attempted to distribute keys by employing special dispatch riders who had been vetted and who were among the company's most trusted employees. | Simon Singh | ||
| c331cb0 | dispatch riders would race across the world with padlocked briefcases, personally distributing keys to everyone who would receive messages from the bank over the next week. As business networks grew in size, as more messages were sent, and as more keys had to be delivered, the banks found that this distribution process became a horrendous logistical nightmare, and the overhead costs became prohibitive. | Simon Singh | ||
| 390fa34 | alphabetic scripts tend to have between 20 and 40 characters (Russian, for example, has 36 signs, and Arabic has 28). | Simon Singh | ||
| e4fbd52 | When ships carrying COMSEC material came into dock, crypto-custodians would march onboard, collect stacks of cards, paper tapes, floppy disks, or whatever other medium the keys might be stored on, and then deliver them to the intended recipients. | Simon Singh | ||
| 5ba4c44 | scripts that rely on semagrams tend to have hundreds or even thousands of signs (Chinese has over 5,000). | Simon Singh | ||
| efcef9d | Syllabic scripts occupy the middle ground, with between 50 and 100 syllabic characters. Beyond these two facts, Linear B was an unfathomable mystery. | Simon Singh | ||
| ca5c041 | Quantum cryptography is an unbreakable system of encryption. | Simon Singh | ||
| 8db6821 | one-way functions are sometimes called Humpty Dumpty functions. Modular arithmetic, sometimes called clock arithmetic in schools, is an area of mathematics that is rich in one-way functions. In modular arithmetic, mathematicians consider a finite group of numbers arranged in a loop, | Simon Singh | ||
| 3635671 | in the 1980s it was only government, the military and large businesses that owned computers powerful enough to run RSA. Not surprisingly, RSA Data Security, Inc., the company set up to commercialize RSA, developed their encryption products with only these markets in mind. | Simon Singh | ||
| 4e12dfd | Zimmermann believed that everybody deserved the right to the privacy that was offered by RSA encryption, and he directed his political zeal toward developing an RSA encryption product for the masses. | Simon Singh | ||
| f1c402c | Zimmermann employed a neat trick that used asymmetric RSA encryption in tandem with old-fashioned symmetric encryption. | Simon Singh | ||
| 453f900 | Pliny the Elder explained how the "milk" of the tithymalus plant could be used as an invisible ink. Although the ink is transparent after drying, gentle heating chars it and turns it brown. Many organic fluids behave in a similar way, because they are rich in carbon and therefore char easily." | Simon Singh | ||
| 7d4959d | It has been said that the First World War was the chemists' war, because mustard gas and chlorine were employed for the first time, and that the Second World War was the physicists' war, because the atom bomb was detonated. Similarly, it has been argued that the Third World War would be the mathematicians' war, because mathematicians will have control over the next great weapon of war--information. | Simon Singh | ||
| d130cfc | The Vigenere cipher was called "le chiffre indechiffrable," but Babbage broke it;" | Simon Singh | ||
| 0ba833d | The security of a cryptosystem must not depend on keeping secret the crypto-algorithm. The security depends only on keeping secret the key. | Simon Singh | ||
| 7c9a56f | In June 1991 he took the drastic step of asking a friend to post PGP on a Usenet bulletin board. PGP is just a piece of software, and so from the bulletin board it could be downloaded by anyone for free. PGP was now loose on the Internet. | Simon Singh | ||
| 03b27c4 | Rejewski had no idea of the day key, and he had no idea which message keys were being chosen, but he did know that they resulted in this table of relationships. Had | Simon Singh |