60 Years of Cryptography, 1949-2009 104
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."
Hooray! (Score:2, Insightful)
Mention of Enigma (Score:5, Insightful)
But none of Alan Turing.
How come? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Oh stop (Score:1, Insightful)
Seriously, anti-American bitching gets really old. You don't like that America was a major force behind crypto? Too bad, that's how it is, stop whining.
As for why they chose this, well it makes sense. Modern cryptography, as in the crypto we use these days, started with Shannon's paper. This is when things started becoming a real science, making extensive use of number theory and so on. Prior to that, crypto was largely just whatever sort of codes people could come up with that seemed hard. There wasn't any good science behind it.
A good example would be the code talkers, used by the US. The code was never broken during the war, but not because it was unbreakable. All it was was a language that wasn't spoken in Europe, and very dissimilar to European languages. That combined with misleading terminology made it something the Axis couldn't crack. However, there was no good math/science keeping it uncrackable. All they'd have needed to do was get a code talker who was willing to work for them and the thing would have been useless.
While the British worked on code breaking, and some of what was discovered there applies to modern code breaking, they didn't work on modern coding techniques. Their concern was breaking the codes of the day, understandably.
There really is a massive before/after crypto divide with regards to Shannon's paper. All crypto we use these days is traceable back to then. Thus it makes sense as a starting point for modern cryptography.
So seriously, chill with the US hating. To me this chosen starting point doesn't seem at all about the US trying to "steal" history, it seems like a sensible historical fact. You look at how modern codes work and you say "What started this? Where did this come from?" it comes back to that paper.
Wtf? (Score:4, Insightful)
"While the British worked on code breaking, and some of what was discovered there applies to modern code breaking, they didn't work on modern coding techniques. Their concern was breaking the codes of the day, understandably."
Oh right, so conveniently the 1940s don't count as "modern" , but the 1950s do? What a crock of shit. Talk about modifiying meanings to suit your own ends. The german codes were created using a machine and on the british side were partly decoded using electronic computers. If that doesn't count as modern then I don't know what does.
Re:How do you know when you've decrypted something (Score:3, Insightful)
"Encrypted twice" doesn't mean anything. A composed encryption scheme is a single function, same as y = (2x + 1)^2 - 4.
As stated below, steganography is the stopping problem here. Is the secret meaning hidden in typos and word order, or do the words have a second meaning?
With Thanks to Wikimedia (Score:3, Insightful)
And every [wikipedia.org], single [wikipedia.org], image [wikipedia.org] in that slide show is ripped directly from Wikipedia. In fact, the entire presentation is little more that a digest of someones Wikitrip.
As Paul Graham(I think) said, "Pay to view content on the internet may as well not exist". Given that information not on the internet is becoming increasingly obsolete, this maxim can be extended to the conclusion that; the only content that will matter is that which is freely available online. People such as journalists or even reviewing researchers are not going to go to the hassle of chasing down sources closeted in dusty libraries or the like, when low hanging fruit such as Wikipedia pages are so easily accessible.
There was a story a few weeks ago about how a copyright black hole [ft.com] is swallowing our culture. Well, it's swallowing more than that. It's swallowing cold hard facts, data, progress and information too. Compound this easily accessible and digestible, though lower quality, alternatives available online at places like Wikipedia, and you are seeing the beginning of a major shift in how our society comes by its information and the truth itself.
For over 5 months Wikipedia had an incorrect start date for World War 2 [wikipedia.org]. In the new information regime that is emerging, for a great many (mostly younger) people, for those 5 months, that became the start date for World War 2. The (old) correct date was cloistered away in libraries and pay per view papers or books. The new date was the first hit on a Google search. Which is more likely to become the dominant interpretation?
We have seen it time and again. Cheaper and easier will win out over expensive and difficult. The same is now happening for information. This doesn't necessarily mean that cheap and easy has to be worse, but in the case of finding cold hard facts online, it is. There is no quality control on the internet hive mind [jonathancrossfield.com]. The online or Wikipedia version of the truth is becoming the dominant one, and with the black hole swallowing all the hard facts, how will we ever find the real truth again?
Orwell was right about the outcome, but wrong about the method. You don't need to hide the truth. You just need to make the alternatives easier to find.
Re:Wtf? (Score:4, Insightful)
In the 1940s, the British were no further along in designing codes than the Germans. Both used ingenious versions of the old letter substitution algorithm. Shannon's paper and the advent of digital computers were a watershed in code design.
That the British used electronic computers to break German codes is entirely beside the point. It's not a coincidence the headline talks about 'cryptography' and not the art of reading or breaking codes, i.e. cryptanalysis.