Before approaching Claude Shannon’s contribution to Cryptography, one must look at his prior work in particular in the field of information theory, a field he theorized in his 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Information. Shannon introduced a lot of the ideas that were mentioned and developed in this revolutionary paper to the scientific community in his 1945 paper entitled A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography.
Indeed, during the Second World War, Shannon decided to join the Bell Labs, a research facility concentrating many prominent scientists of the time who decided to use their talent to serve the war effort. While he was working at the Bell Labs, the facility was in charge of many secret projects such as the development of the X system. The X system referred to “an encrypted radiotelephone system to connect Washington and London.” Although Shannon was not part of the project per se, he was asked to test the inscription scheme of the project. This inscription scheme was based on two very important concepts, namely “sampling” and “quantization.” “The idea was to approximate a continuous signal by a series of steps – as if we superimpose the continuous signal by what seems a stairway that goes up and down following the shape of the signal.” Sampling refers the action of choosing those steps while quantization refers to the action of defining the height of each step. This process enabled to approximate continuous signals with series of discrete steps. When applied to the telephone, it enabled the high command in both London and Washington to communicate with each other knowing that the Germans would never pick up on their conversations. One of the problems though was that since the message was broken down into steps before ...
... middle of paper ...
...ot describe how to achieve this outcome.
It is the discovering we just described that allowed Shannon to publish in 1949 his paper Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems in which he developed the concept of a Cryptosystem. To understand the revolutionary nature of this publication, we are now going to describe what cryptography was before its publication.
Polyalphabetic substitution ciphers were developed during the Renaissance period in Europe and were the dominant type of encrypting for confidential messages during both World Wars. The Second World War was one that was considered especially technological. Cryptography was very important and whoever would break the other side’s code would have an enormous advantage in the war. In the end, the British with the help of Alan Turing broke the German code “Enigma” and the Americans broke the Japanese code “Purple.”
Wireless is a methodical account of the early development of wireless telegraphy and the inventors who made it possible. Sungook Hong examines several early significant inventions, including Hertzian waves and optics, the galvanometer, transatlantic signaling, Marconi's secret-box, Fleming's air-blast key and double transformation system, Lodge's syntonic transmitter and receiver, the Edison effect, the thermionic valve, and the audion and continuous wave. Wireless fills the gap created by Hugh Aitken, who described at length the early development of wireless communication, but who did not attempt "to probe the substance and context of scientific and engineering practice in the early years of wireless" (p. x). Sungook Hong seeks to fill this gap by offering an exhaustive analysis of the theoretical and experimental engineering and scientific practices of the early days of wireless; by examining the borderland between science and technology; depicting the transformation of scientific effects into technological artifacts; and showing how the race for scientific and engineering accomplishment fuels the politic of the corporate institution. While the author succeeds in fulfilling these goals, the thesis, it seems, is to affirm Guglielmo Marconi's place in history as the father of wireless telegraphy.
Coding and encryption were two very important elements in the use of espionage. Enigmas were cipher machines that were based mainly on a wired code wheel. The wired code wheel, known more commonly as a rotor, would be shaped similar to a hockey puck made of non-conductive material, such as rubber, and have two sides, an input plate and an output plate and around the circumference are 26 evenly spaced electrical contacts. The 26 contacts on the input plate would be connected by wired through the body of the rotor to the 26 contacts on the output plate. An alphabet ring would then be placed around the rotors 26 contacts therefore creating a cipher alphabet.
This lecture was given by Dr. David Mirza Ahmad one of chief mentors of Subgraph, which is a open-source security start-up based out in Montreal. The talk was based on Kerchoff’s principle which states “the security of any cryptographic system does not rest in its secrecy; it must be able to fall into the enemy’s hand without inconvenience” [1]. The kerchoff’s principle underlines the fact that free software should be having reasonably good security. This fact is well understood by the world of cryptography because cryptography is a black-box where you never know what is happening inside it.
The development of technology such as the coding machine Enigma extended the amount of time battles lasted. During the battle of Stalingrad, German troops were able to send encrypted messages to communicate. When they were being surrounded by the USSR, they communicated in code on how they were running low on numbers and what parts of the city they were the
The RSA cryptosystem, imagined by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman , was pitched in the August 1977 issue of Scientic American. The cryptosystem is generally ordinarily utilized for giving security and guaranteeing legitimacy of advanced information. Nowadays RSA is sent in numerous business frameworks. It is utilized by web servers and programs to secure web traffic, it is used to guarantee security and legitimacy of Email, it is utilized to secure remote login sessions, and it is at the heart of electronic Visa installment frameworks. In short, RSA is much of the time utilized within provisions where security of advanced information is a worry.
Although this idea had been successfully implemented during World War I using the Choctaw Indian's language, history generally credits Philip Johnston for the idea to use Navajos to transmit code across enemy lines. Philip recognized that people brought up without hearing Navajo spoken had no chance at all to decipher this unwritten, strangely syntactical, and guttural language (Navajo). Fortunately, Johnston was capable of developing this idea because his missionary father had raised him on the Navajo reservation. As a child, Johnston learned the Navajo language as he grew up along side his many Navajo friends (Lagerquist 19). With this knowledge of the language, Johnston was able to expand upon the idea of Native Americans transmitting messages in their own language in order to fool enemies who were monitoring transmissions. Not only did the Code Talkers transmit messages in Navajo, but the messages were also spoken in a code that Navajos themselves could not understand (Paul 7).
In the rapidly developing field of computer science, there is no more controversial issue than encryption. Encryption has become a highly contested issue with the broad use of global networks including the Internet. As more and more sensitive documents are being placed on computer networks, and trusted information is being sent from computer to computer throughout the world, the need for encryption has never been greater. However, the effects of encryption on our lifestyle and the government's role in encryption has been (and will continue to be) debated for years to come.
In conclusion, we’ve gone through three machines that helped shape cryptography not only during World War II, but helped shape the science as a whole for future years. We’ve seen advancements, in mathematics, from both encryption and decryption, plaintexts and ciphertexts. Enigma, although it started as a three rotor device advanced to eight rotors, “Purple” was a finished product of years of experimental cipher machines, and the Lorenz Cipher, got it’s start from Vernam. Technology builds on each other and failures turn into successes, and although World War II was a dark time for our planet, the advances that we achieved from that period are things that we still use and can continue to learn from to this day.
Cryptography during the 1940’s when the U.S. became were involved in World War II had a huge beneficial impact on the outcome of many key battles. Its impacts helped to snowball certain Military and Naval strategies because of their knowledge of the enemies next offensive threats. The improvements made over decades to the study of cryptology, made deciphering codes more efficient and ultimately turned the tables for the allies after the Battle of Midway.
around 1917, the cryptanalysis history was impacted by British cryptographers, who encountered German encoded telegram called Zimmerman telegram. They are able to decipher the telegram which convinced United States for joining the war.
E. Shannon and W. Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Information. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1969.
Cryptography was first used long before the invention of computers. One well-known system was attributed to the reign of Julius Caesar (Klein ix). Another example is the famous Zimmerman telegraph, which was sent from Germany to Mexico during World War I (ix). In a more modern setting, cryptology was mainly used by the government until the late 1970s (Simpson 1). This is largely due to the fact that computers were too expensive, so not many households or businesses had them (1). However, after the computer revolution, cryptology became more public, especially in the business industry where there was a greater need to secure things like transactions (1).
When World War II broke out in 1939 the United States was severely technologically disabled. There existed almost nothing in the way of mathematical innovations that had been integrated into military use. Therefore, the government placed great emphasis on the development of electronic technology that could be used in battle. Although it began as a simple computer that would aid the army in computing firing tables for artillery, what eventually was the result was the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). Before the ENIAC it took over 20 hours for a skilled mathematician to complete a single computation for a firing situation. When the ENIAC was completed and unveiled to the public on Valentine’s Day in 1946 it could complete such a complex problem in 30 seconds. The ENIAC was used quite often by the military but never contributed any spectacular or necessary data. The main significance of the ENIAC was that it was an incredible achievement in the field of computer science and can be considered the first digital and per...
In this era when the Internet provides essential communication between tens of millions of people and is being increasingly used as a tool for security becomes a tremendously important issue to deal with, So it is important to deal with it. There are many aspects to security and many applications, ranging from secure commerce and payments to private communications and protecting passwords. One essential aspect for secure communications is that of cryptography. But it is important to note that while cryptography is necessary for secure communications, it is not by itself sufficient. Cryptography is the science of writing in secret code and is an ancient art; In the old age people use to send encoded message which can be understand by the receiver only who know the symbolic and relative meaning of that encoded message .The first documented use of cryptography in writing dates back to circa 1900 B.C. Egyptian scribe used non-standard hieroglyphs in an inscription. After writing was invented cryptography appeared spontaneously with applications ranging from diplomatic missives to war-time battle plans. It is no surprise, then, that new forms of cryptography came soon after the widespread development of computer communications. In telecommunications and data cryptography is necessary when communicating in any untrusted medium, which includes any network, particularly the Internet [1].Within the context of any application-to-application communication, there are some security requirements, including: