Quotes About Cryptography

significance of the key, as opposed to the algorithm, is an enduring principle of cryptography. It was definitively stated in 1883 by the Dutch linguist Auguste Kerckhoffs von Nieuwenhof in his book La Cryptographie militaire: "Kerckhoffs' Principle: The security of a cryptosystem must not depend on keeping secret the crypto-algorithm. The security depends only on keeping secret the key.

The Vigenère cipher was called "le chiffre indéchiffrable," but Babbage broke it;

What affected me most profoundly was the realization that the sciences of cryptography and mathematics are very elegant, pure sciences. I found that the ends for which these pure sciences are used are less elegant.

Computers had their origin in military cryptography—in a sense, every computer game represents the commandeering of a military code-breaking apparatus for purposes of human expression.

Of course, when I joined the Navy and when I took up the correspondence course in cryptography, I had to sign an oath that I would never reveal what sort of work I was involved in. It was only some years after the war that Congress passed a statute relieving me of that obligation.

When the Bitcoin white paper emerged in 2008, it was completely revolutionary. The amount of concepts that had to come together in just the right way - computer science, cryptography, and economic incentives - was astonishing.

When using symmetric algorithms, the sender and receiver use the same key for encryption and decryption functions.

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.

if a message protected by quantum cryptography were ever to be deciphered, it would mean that quantum theory is flawed

The first known European book to describe the use of cryptography was written in the thirteenth century by the English Franciscan monk and polymath Roger Bacon. Epistle on the Secret Works of Art and the Nullity of Magic included seven methods for keeping messages secret, and cautioned: "A man is crazy who writes a secret in any other way than one which will conceal it from the vulgar.

This apparently innocuous observation would lead to the first great breakthrough in cryptanalysis.

Through decentralized cryptography, Bitcoin eliminates the need for banking intermediaries, significantly lowering transaction costs, and could liberate poverty-stricken economies around the globe by providing access to capital to the one-third of humanity that is excluded from the financial world.

Anyone who tries to create his or her own cryptographic primitive is either a genius or a fool. Givent the geius/fool ratio of our species, the odds aren't very good.

Anyone who tries to create his or her own cryptographic primitive is either a genius or a fool. Givent the genius/fool ratio of our species, the odds aren't very good.

I thought cryptography was a technique that did not require your trusting other people-that if you encrypted your files, you would have the control to make the choice as to whether you would surrender your files.

Crypt walls. We all have them, there inside—you don't go there often, do you? It's where you keep your dead. Dead relatives, dead dreams, dead promises. Dead selves, so many of those, so many. When you loot, you only take the best things. The things you can use, the things you can sell. And when you seal it all up again, the darkness remains.

This has serveral consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms--translation: all your bank account are belong to us--

The theorem is a hack on discrete number theory that simultaneously disproves the Church-Turing hypothesis (wave if you understood that) and worse, permits NP-complete problems to be converted into P-complete ones. This has several consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms—translation: all your bank account are belong to us—and ending with the ability to computationally generate a Dho-Nha geometry curve in real time. This

There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered corresponds to the laws of the universe, the intercepted messages to the evidence available, the keys for a day or a message to important constants which have to be determined. The correspondence is very close, but the subject matter of cryptography is very easily dealt with by discrete machinery, physics not so easily." —Alan Turing

These are one-time pads.

Our policies concerning free speech, telecommunications, and cryptography have evolved from a series of simple, rational decisions. But they are today so complex that no one can understand them, even in one single country, to say nothing of all countries taken together.

CRYPTOLOGY, as the union of cryptography and cryptanalysis is called.

Smart, rabidly paranoid people are the backbone of cryptology

Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of cryptography.