Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were guilty of unjustified wiretaps, and President John F. Kennedy conducted dubious wiretaps in the first month of his presidency.
Ron Rivest, one of the inventors of RSA, thinks that restricting cryptography would be foolhardy: It is poor policy to clamp down indiscriminately on a technology just because some criminals might be...
The security of a cryptosystem must not depend on keeping secret the crypto-algorithm. The security depends only on keeping secret the key.
Diagonally polarized photons are in a quantum quandary when confronted by a vertical Polaroid filter.
In the 1980s it was only government, the military and large businesses that owned computers powerful enough to run RSA. Not surprisingly, RSA Data Security, Inc., the company set up to commercialize R...
All that was required to measure the planet was a man with a stick and a brain. In other words, couple an intellect with some experimental apparatus and almost anything seems achievable.
Because a quantum computer deals with 1’s and 0’s that are in a quantum superposition, they are called quantum bits, or qubits (pronounced cubits). The advantage of qubits becomes even clearer when we...
Had the Arabs merely been familiar with the use of the mono-alphabetic substitution cipher, they would not warrant a significant mention in any history of cryptography. However, in addition to employi...
I am a liar!
I told Ron to take my name off the paper, recalls Adleman. I told him that it was his invention, not mine. But Ron refused and we got into a discussion about it.
Rejewski had vastly simplified the task of finding the day key by divorcing the problem of finding the scrambler settings from the problem of finding the plugboard settings. On their own, both of thes...
The construction of mathematical logic had become the arbiter of truth. This was the Pythagoreans' greatest contribution to civilisation - a way of achieving truth which is beyond the fallibility of h...
Had the cipher machines been used properly—without repeated message keys, without cillies, without restrictions on plugboard settings and scrambler arrangements, and without stereotypical messages whi...
The Germans therefore took the clever step of using the day key settings to transmit a new message key for each message.
„Kolem roku 1790, když byla ratifikována Listina svobod, mohl soukromě mluvit kdokoliv s kýmkoliv - s jistotou, jakou už dnes nemá nikdo - prostě tak, že popošel po cestě kousek od ostatních a podíval...
Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. ‘Immortality’ may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of w...
By depriving Rejewski of the keys, Langer believed he was preparing him for the inevitable time when the keys would no longer be available. He knew that if war broke out it would be impossible for Sch...
French listening posts learned to recognize a radio operator’s fist. Once encrypted, a message is sent in Morse code, as a series of dots and dashes, and each operator can be identified by his pauses,...
Histaiaeus shaved the head of his messenger, wrote the message on his scalp, and then waited for the hair to regrow. This was clearly a period of history that tolerated a certain lack of urgency.
I had written this paper on pancake numbers with help from my adviser, Manuel Blum, who's a well-known computer scientist, and we submitted it to a journal called . I subsequently left graduate school...
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