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60 Years of Cryptography, 1949-2009
Dan Jones writes "2009 marks 60 years since the advent of modern cryptography. It was back in October 1949 when mathematician Claude Shannon published a paper on Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems. According to his employer at the time, Bell Labs, the work transformed cryptography from an art to a science and is generally considered the foundation of modern cryptography. Since then significant developments in secure communications have continued, particularly with the advent of the Internet and Web. CIO has a pictorial representation of the past six decades of research and development in encryption technology. Highlights include the design of the first quantum cryptography protocol by Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard in 1984, and the EFF's 'Deep Crack' DES code breaker of 1998."
Er... Bletchley Park anyone? Shhhhh - don't mention the war!
Several years ago I visited the National Cryptologic Museum at Ft Meade MD. http://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/museum/
At the time you had to go through a gate with armed military types then make your way around to the museum parking lot. Once inside, I remembered that I had forgotten to lock my car doors, and mentioned to the guard that I was going to go back out to the parking lot to do this. He looked at me and said, "Don't worry about it, your car is being watched".
In any case, I highly recommend visiting this museum if you are a geek type. from a real Enigma that you can touch, to a Cray II that you can sit on, this place is cryptogeek heaven. A truly interesting experience.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
A stupid question you might think , but unless you know what the output should be , how do you know when you've found it? Unless a computer knows every language on the planet and "reads" ever version of the potential output and decides if it makes sense how can it ever know when the decryption is finished? And what if its not plain text its decrypting but something else entirely such as a binary file? Perhaps I'm just dumb but this is something I've never understodd.
Fair enough , but what if something has been encrypted twice? You've successfully decrypted the 2nd stage but the output is still statistically noise because its still encrypted by the 1st encryption stage. How would you solve this problem?