Quotes About Encryption

Tunny should still have been unbreakable, but like Enigma it was made vulnerable by the carelessness of its operators and the bureaucratic nature of their system.

We think that providing this kind of secure private means of communication for the masses for 99.999 percent of people that have nothing to do with terrorism means more than the threat that we see from the other side.

the cipher was based on the product of two hundred-digit prime numbers, and the National Security Agency had staked its reputation on the claim that the fastest computer in existence could not crack it before the Big Crunch at the end of the Universe.

These were encrypted. They'll think they're absolutely safe. (Andre) 'Yeah, and he was three feet tall and green.' (Steele)

Even the Vatican, probably the second most active center of cryptanalysis, would send Soro seemingly impenetrable messages that had fallen into its hands. In 1526, Pope Clement VII sent him two encrypted messages, and both were returned having been successfully cryptanalyzed.

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 Alice and Bob will be able to detect her presence. Quantum cryptography therefore allows Alice and Bob to exchange and agree upon a onetime pad in complete privacy, and thereafter they can use this as a key to encrypt a message.

Previous experience, however, tells us that every so-called unbreakable cipher has, sooner or later, succumbed to cryptanalysis

Quantum cryptography would mark the end of the battle between codemakers and codebreakers, the codemakers emerging victorious, because quantum cryptography is a truly unbreakable system of encryption.

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, but it also makes it much more complicated to use. The additional effort required in order to implement the Vigenère cipher discouraged many people from employing it.

the development of a fully operational quantum computer would imperil our personal privacy, destroy electronic commerce and demolish the concept of national security. A quantum computer would jeopardize the stability of the world.

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, the speed of transmission, and the relative lengths of dots and dashes. A fist is the equivalent of a recognizable style of handwriting.

If each battalion in the Pacific employed a pair of Native Americans as radio operators, secure communication could be guaranteed. This would be much simpler than a mechanical encryption device and much harder to crack.

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 then deliver them to the intended recipients.

Quantum cryptography is an unbreakable system of encryption.

Al-Kindi's technique, known as frequency analysis, shows that it is unnecessary to check each of the billions of potential keys. Instead, it is possible to reveal the contents of a scrambled message simply by analysing the frequency of the characters in the ciphertext.

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.

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.

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.

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

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