A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.
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 part...
The enemy of security: repetition leads to patterns, and cryptanalysts thrive on patterns.
The First World War was the chemists’ war, because mustard gas and chlorine were employed for the first time,
Imagined a machine whose internal workings could be altered so that it could perform all the functions of all conceivable Turing machines. The alterations would be made by inserting carefully selected...
If N is large enough, it is virtually impossible to deduce p and q from N, and this is perhaps the most beautiful and elegant aspect of the RSA asymmetric cipher.
Zimmermann employed a neat trick that used asymmetric RSA encryption in tandem with old-fashioned symmetric encryption.
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...
When Hermann Göring 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 To...
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?
The best random keys are created by harnessing natural physical processes, such as radioactivity, which is known to exhibit truly random behavior. The
The French had handed the information from Schmidt to the Poles because they believed it to be of no value, but the Poles had proved them wrong.
Scientific proof is inevitably fickle and shoddy. On the other hand mathematical proof is absolute and devoid of doubt.
Polský úspěch v prolomení Enigmy byl dán třemi faktory: strachem, matematikou a špionáží.
One of the features of the Enigma machine was its inability to encipher a letter as itself, which was a consequence of the reflector. The letter a could never be enciphered as A, the letter b could ne...
Most of the codebreakers returned to their civilian lives, sworn to secrecy, unable to reveal their pivotal role in the Allied war effort. While those who had fought conventional battles could talk of...
Euclid discovered that perfect numbers are always the multiple of two numbers, one of which is a power of 2 and the other being the next power of 2 minus 1.
Each distinct cipher can be considered in terms of a general encrypting method, known as the algorithm, and a key, which specifies the exact details of a particular encryption.
Cryptanalysis could not be invented until a civilization had reached a sufficiently sophisticated level of scholarship in several disciplines, including mathematics, statistics, and linguistics. The M...
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.