Quotes About Cryptanalysis

The task of the cryptanalysts consisted primarily of reconstructing the wiring and switches of the coding wheels—a task made more burdensome by the daily change of plugboard connections.

This kind of work, particularly in the early stages of a difficult cryptanalysis, is perhaps the most excruciating, exasperating, agonizing mental process known to man.

He served as a cryptanalyst with the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, and returned to River-bank to write an 87-page tract that revolutionized cryptanalysis by introducing statistical methods for the first time.

between 321 and 300 B.C., recommended that ambassadors use cryptanalysis to obtain intelligence: "If there is no possibility of carrying on any such conversation (conversation with the people regarding their loyalty), he [the envoy] may try to gather such information by observing the talk of beggars, intoxicated and insane persons, or of persons babbling in sleep, or by observing the signs made in places of pilgrimage and temples, or by deciphering paintings or secret writings.

Gorgo, who may be considered the first woman cryptanalyst

The original eight cryptanalysts were supplemented, after Pearl Harbor, by some of the musicians from the band of the sunken battleship California. For reasons no one understood, musicians were good at decoding.

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.

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

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

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 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.

He perfectly fits the profile of a Hut 8 man, who need not know anything except pure math.

Pattern, as he saw it, equals redundancy. In ordinary language, redundancy serves as an aid to understanding. In cryptanalysis, that same redundancy is the Achilles' heel.

the British computer pioneer who broke the German wartime codes and then committed suicide by biting into a cyanide-

No code is ever completely solved, you know. —ELIZEBETH S. FRIEDMAN

Many a Hitler decision – decisions that infuriated his generals by their seeming lack of logic at the time – can probably be explained by the work of Göring's Forschungsamt, Ribbentrop's ministry and the naval staff's cryptanalysis branch.

But of any science of cryptanalysis, there was nothing. Only cryptography existed. And therefore cryptology, which involves both cryptography and cryptanalysis, had not yet come into being so far

Also of great importance in the discovery of linguistic phenomena that led to cryptanalysis was the development of lexicography.

The technique was at least moderately well known, for Ibn Khald?n wrote in The Muqaddimah: "Occasionally, skillful secretaries, though not the first to invent a code [and with no previous knowledge of it], nonetheless find rules [for solving it] through combinations which they evolve for the purpose with the help of their intelligence, and which they call 'solving the puzzle [cryptanalysis].

No one can duplicate the confidence that RSA offers after 20 years of cryptanalytic review.