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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."
But none of Alan Turing.
Though that might had happened earlier than the summary suggests...from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biuro_Szyfrow#Enigma_solved :
Rejewski made in December 1932, according to historian David Kahn, one of the greatest advances in cryptologic history by applying pure mathematics group theory to breaking the German armed forces' Enigma machine ciphers.
BTW, since most of you are unlikely to read the whole wiki article, there's one very amusing part... ;p
On September 17, as the Soviet Army invaded Poland, Cipher Bureau personnel crossed the southeastern border with other Polish military and government personnel, into Romania. They eventually made their way to France where, at "PC Bruno", outside Paris, they continued breaking German Enigma traffic in collaboration with Bletchley Park, fifty miles northwest of London, England. In the interest of security, the allied cryptological services, before sending their messages over a teletype line, encrypted them using Enigma doubles. Henri Braquenié often closed messages with a "Heil Hitler!"
One that hath name thou can not otter
How come history is written so that "Modern Cryptography" starts when an American writes a paper, some seven years after the British have developed computers to automatically crack Germany's enigma codes? Modern cryptography isn't just the creation of the cipher, but the appreciation of modern techniques to crack it.
If this article can make such an arbitrary assumption about what is modern, I give little credit to how misinformed the rest of the article may be. It's how Americans steal history, so they can define it in their own favor.
I do not mean to flame. I am just skeptical of assumptions, when such a basic assumption is so inherently wrong.
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 *
You don't know - and neither does the computer.
Decryption is a mathematical operation. You are given a blob of yunk. You can be fairly certain it is encrypted with a given cipher because it meets certain characteristics - either length, or hash-depth, or there is a header or footer of a given length, or some revealing information about the cipher may have been sent prior to or alongside the encrypted blob.
Then, if you're smart enough, or you have enough money, or time, or computing power, or a lot of luck, the decryption operation might occur. You can check as to whether or not you've successfully decrypted the data mathematically - e.g. does the result set fit with the function I've just run and give me the source data I started with? If so, yes, you've decrypted the data.
It's your responsibility as a researcher to decide what to do with whatever came out the other side. You may have to decrypt it again before proceeding. You may find out that what you just decrypted was nothing more sinister than ICMP_FRAGMENTATION_REQUIRED (Frak!).
The holy grail of cryptography may infact be steganographical encryption - or binary / machine language that reads as Grandmother's Cookie Recipe, but when run as an executable it actually glasses the machine. Who knows?
Informatus Technologicus