Quotes from Simon Singh

Mersenne met with the other mathematicians, but he was saddened by their reluctance to talk to him or to each other.

During a security briefing at the White House, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld breaks some tragic news: "Mr President, three Brazilian soldiers were killed yesterday while supporting U.S. troops." "My God!" shrieks President George W. Bush, and he buries his head in his hands. He remains stunned and silent for a full minute. Eventually, he looks up, takes a deep breath, and asks Rumsfeld: "How many is a brazillion?

A large amount of identically encrypted material provides a cryptanalyst with a correspondingly larger chance of identifying the key.

the Germans therefore took the clever step of using the day key settings to transmit a new message key for each message.

The three Britons had to sit back and watch as their discoveries were rediscovered by Diffie, Hellman, Merkle, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman over the next three years.

the First World War was the chemists' war, because mustard gas and chlorine were employed for the first time

the way to an intellectual's heart is via her library...

Second World War was the physicists' war, because the atom bomb was detonated.

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 unbreakable, just as the Vigenère cipher was in the nineteenth century, it really is absolutely secure

the Third World War would be the mathematicians' war, because mathematicians will have control over the next great weapon of war—information. Mathematicians have been responsible for developing the codes that are currently used to protect military information.

judges in seventeenth-century France were discouraged from socializing on the grounds that friends and acquaintances might one day be called before the court.

The fate of the Polish nation had depended on Rejewski, and he did not disappoint his country. Rejewski's attack on Enigma is one of the truly great accomplishments of cryptanalysis.

necessity is the mother of invention, then

Jack Good, a veteran of Bletchley, commented: "Fortunately the authorities did not know that Turing was a homosexual. Otherwise we might have lost the war.

I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.

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.

Secret communication achieved by hiding the existence of a message is known as steganography

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 RSA, developed their encryption products with only these markets in mind.

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.

Figure 6 The science of secret writing and its main branches.

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.

He was a rather quirky worker, and he didn't really fit into the day-to-day business of GCHQ. But in terms of coming up with new ideas he was quite exceptional. You had to sort through some rubbish sometimes, but he was very innovative and always willing to challenge the orthodoxy.

the hotline between the presidents of Russia and America is secured via a onetime pad cipher.

Zimmermann believed that everybody deserved the right to the privacy that was offered by RSA encryption, and he directed his political zeal toward developing an RSA encryption product for the masses.