Section 1.2Development of Cryptography
Task: Research on the development of cryptography and fill up the table below with the major events that occurred during each period of time.
Read up on the ciphers you come across in your research and other classical ciphers.
1900 BC / It started in the Egypt town called Menet Khufu near the river Nil. Khnumhotep II was an architect of Pharao Amenemhet II. He built some monuments for the Pharao which had to be documented. Khnumhotep II had the idea to exchange some words and text parts within the document (substitution). In case the document would been stolen, the thief would not find the correct way to the gold treasure.600 BC / Hebrew scribes writing down the book of Jeremiah used a reversed-alphabet simple substitution cipher known as ATBASH. (Jeremiah started dictating to Baruch in 605 BC but the chapters containing these bits of cipher are attributed to a source labeled ``C'' (believed not to be Baruch) which could be an editor writing after the Babylonian exile in 587 BC, someone contemporaneous with Baruch or even Jeremiah himself.) ATBASH was one of a few Hebrew ciphers of the time (SANS).
500 BC / Thucydides tells of orders delivered to the Spartan prince and general Pasanius in 475 BCE via what could be the earliest system of military cryptography, the skytale. As a device for conveying ciphers, the skytale consists of a staff of wood around which a strip of papyrus is tightly wound. Writing the message down the length of the staff, the parchment is unwound to conceal the message. Since the message appears to be nothing more than a series of disconnected letters, its true meaning remains concealed. However, it seems unlikely that such a technique was ever used in this way. Ancient texts by Aeneas the Tactician, Polybius, and others describe further methods for concealing messages but none of these actually seem to have been used either (Glikman). The secret key of the text is the circumference of the wood. With the wrong circumference, the message is unusable. If the wood matches, you are able to read the message. Attacking the skytale was no big thing, this at least when you understood the principle of the algorithm.
50 BC / The Caesar Cipher was developed during the roman empire. The code was based on the replacement of each plaintext character with a new shifted character in the alphabet. The secret key of the shift between the plaintext and the ciphertext. As example, if the shift is 5 and the plaintext is
SECRET FOR YOU
the ciphertext would look as in the example below.
XJHWJY KTW DTZ
This because you calculate plaintext + shift (Secret Key) = ciphertext which is
S + Shift (5) = X.
800 / Cryptanalysis and frequency analysis leading to techniques for breaking monoalphabetic substitution ciphers are developed in A Manuscript on Deciphering Cryptographic Messages by the Muslim mathematician, Al-Kindi (Alkindus), who may have been inspired by textual analysis of the Qur'an. He also covers methods of encipherments, cryptanalysis of certain encipherments, and statistical analysis of letters and letter combinations in Arabic.
1500 / 1518 - Johannes Trithemius' book on cryptology
1553 - Bellaso invents Vigenère cipher
1585 - Vigenère's book on ciphers
1586 - Cryptanalysis used by spy master Sir Francis Walsingham to implicate Mary Queen of Scots in the Babington Plot to murder Queen Elizabeth I of England. Queen Mary was eventually executed.
1600 / 1641 - Wilkins' Mercury (English book on cryptology)
1800 / 1809-14 George Scovell's work on Napoleonic ciphers during the Peninsular War
1831 - Joseph Henry proposes and builds an electric telegraph
1835 - Samuel Morse develops the Morse code
1854 - Wheatstone invents Playfair cipher
1854 - Babbage's method for breaking polyalphabetic ciphers (pub 1863 by Kasiski)
1855 - For the English side in Crimean War, Charles Babbage broke Vigenère's autokey cipher (the 'unbreakable cipher' of the time) as well as the much weaker cipher that is called Vigenère cipher today. Due to secrecy it was also discovered and attributed somewhat later to the Prussian Friedrich Kasiski.
1883 - Auguste Kerckhoffs' La Cryptographie militare published, containing his celebrated laws of cryptography
1885 - Beale ciphers published
1894 - The Dreyfus Affair in France involves the use of cryptography, and its misuse, in regard to false documents.
1900 / 1915 - William Friedman applies statistics to cryptanalysis (coincidence counting, etc)
1917 - Zimmermann telegram intercepted and decrypted, advancing U.S. entry into World War I.
1919 - Edward Hebern invents/patents first rotor machine design a rotor machine is an electro-mechanical device used for encrypting and decrypting secret messages. A rotor machine is an electro-mechanical device used for encrypting and decrypting secret messages
1920 / 1921 - Washington Naval Conference - U.S. negotiating team aided by decryption of Japanese diplomatic telegrams. The message revealed the lowest naval ratio that would be acceptable to Tokyo; U.S. negotiators used this knowledge to push the Japanese to giving in.
1924 - MI8 (Herbert Yardley, et al) provide breaks of assorted traffic in support of US position at Washington Naval Conference; aiding other cryptanalysts to break more codes.
1932 - first break of German Army Enigma by Marian Rejewski in Poland, giving them a jumpstart British reading of the Enigma- a rotor machine used to generate ciphers for the encryption and decryption of secret messages.
1931 - The American Black Chamber (cryptography headquarters) by Herbert O. Yardley is published, revealing much about American cryptography, giving people an opportunity to learn more about it.
1940 / 1940 - break of Japan's PURPLE machine cipher by SIS team. However, U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor surprised by Japanese attack, despite U.S. breaking of Japanese codes. U.S. enters World War II
April 1943 - Admiral Yamamoto, architect of Pearl Harbor attack, is assassinated by U.S. forces who know his itinerary from decoded messages. This shows that the lives of cryptographers are fragile.
December 1943 - The Colossus computer was built, by Thomas Flowers at The Post Office Research Laboratories in London, to crack the German Lorenz cipher (SZ42). It was so advanced that the computer had to be destroyed, lest it fell into the wrong hands.
1946 - VENONA's first break into Soviet espionage traffic from early 1940s
Navajo codetalkers were Navajo people who were employed to transmit and deliver secret messages in the battlefield. It was extremely useful as their language was completely differently structured as compared to the commonly used ones. Up till today, the Navajo language cannot be cracked without the knowledge of the language itself.
1968 / 1968 - John Anthony Walker walks into the Soviet Union's embassy in Washington and
sells information on KL-7 cipher machine. The Walker spy ring operates until 1985.
1974 - Horst Feistel develops Feistel network block cipher design.
1976 - the Data Encryption Standard was published as an official Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) for the United States.
1976 / The Data Encryption Standard was published as an official Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) for the United States. The Data Encryption Standard (DES) is a cipher (a method for encrypting information) selected as an official Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) for the United States in 1976 and which has subsequently enjoyed widespread use internationally. The algorithm was initially controversial with classified design elements, a relatively short key length, and suspicions about a National Security Agency (NSA) backdoor. DES consequently came under intense academic scrutiny which motivated the modern understanding of block ciphers and their cryptanalysis.
Diffie and Hellman publish New Directions in Cryptography.
1991 / Phil Zimmermann releases the public key encryption program PGP along with its source code, which quickly appears on the Internet. Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is a computer program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication. PGP is often used for signing, encrypting and decrypting e-mails to increase the security of e-mail communications.
2000 / RSA Security Inc. released their RSA algorithm into the public domain, a few days in advance of their U.S. Patent 4,405,829 expiring. Following the relaxation of the U.S. government export restrictions, this removed one of the last barriers to the world-wide distribution of much software based on cryptographic systems
2010 / Quantum cryptography, or quantum key distribution (QKD), uses quantum mechanics to guarantee secure communication. It enables two parties to produce a shared random bit string known only to them, which can be used as a key to encrypt and decrypt messages. An important and unique property of quantum cryptography is the ability of the two communicating users to detect the presence of any third party trying to gain knowledge of the key. This results from a fundamental part of quantum mechanics: the process of measuring a quantum system in general disturbs the system. A third party trying to eavesdrop on the key must in some way measure it, thus introducing detectable anomalies. By using quantum superpositions or quantum entanglement and transmitting information in quantum states, a communication system can be implemented which detects eavesdropping. If the level of eavesdropping is below a certain threshold a key can be produced which is guaranteed as secure (i.e. the eavesdropper has no information about), otherwise no secure key is possible and communication is aborted. The security of quantum cryptography relies on the foundations of quantum mechanics, in contrast to traditional public key cryptography which relies on the computational difficulty of certain mathematical functions, and cannot provide any indication of eavesdropping or guarantee of key security.