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...
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...
Previous experience, however, tells us that every so-called unbreakable cipher has, sooner or later, succumbed to cryptanalysis
Number theorists consider prime numbers to be the most important numbers of all because they are the atoms of mathematics. Prime numbers are the numerical building blocks because all other numbers can...
Maths is one of the purest forms of thought, and to outsiders mathematicians may seem almost other-worldly.
Major General Howard Conner, without the Navajos, the marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.
In June 1991 he took the drastic step of asking a friend to post PGP on a Usenet bulletin board. PGP is just a piece of software, and so from the bulletin board it could be downloaded by anyone for fr...
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.
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...
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,...
For decades, ENIAC, not Colossus, was considered the mother of all computers.
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...
Babbage’s successful cryptanalysis of the Vigenère cipher was probably achieved in 1854, soon after his spat with Thwaites, but his discovery went completely unrecognized because he never published it...
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...
The greatest tribute to the work of the Navajo is the simple fact that their code is one of very few throughout history that was never broken.
The Vigenère cipher belongs to a class known as polyalphabetic, because it employs several cipher alphabets per message. The polyalphabetic nature of the Vigenère cipher is what gives it its strength,...
Quantum cryptography is a system that ensures the security of a message by making it hard for Eve to read accurately a communication between Alice and Bob. Furthermore, if Eve tries to eavesdrop then...
It can be mathematically proved that it is impossible for a cryptanalyst to crack a message encrypted with a onetime pad cipher. In other words, the onetime pad cipher is not merely believed to be unb...
Baseball is a game played by the dexterous, but only understood by the Poindexterous.9
A Navajo verb is conjugated not solely according to its subject, but also according to its object. The verb ending depends on which category the object belongs to: long (e.g., pipe, pencil), slender a...