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The Sumerians develop cuneiform writing and the Egyptions
develop Hieroglyphic writing. Sumerian Cuneiform is
the oldest known written language in human history and
was not deciphered until the nineteenth century AD.
The earliest known form comes from Uruk, which took
the form of 'word-pictures' drawn with a stylus on tablets
of damp clay. Each word-picture represented an object.
The word-pictures from Uruk developed into the new script
now called cuneiform. The pictures gradually became
'ideographs', an object also meaning an 'idea'. Then
came 'phonograms' representing sounds as well as the
meaning of a picture. Hieroglyphs are unlike Sumerian
Cuneiform in that it is much more obscure. It was once
thought that Egyptian Hieroglyphs were religious and
historical, but recent developments could point to an
economical purpose for the script.
Egyptian Hieroglyphic writing
The first known incidence of cryptography. A scribe
used nonstandard hieroglyphs in an inscription. About
Hieroglyphs: From the greek meaning "sacred writing",
this is the picture language that was used most often
to decorate temples and monuments. It could be written
with pen and ink on papyrus, painted or carved into
stone. It was carefully drawn to make the signs as accurate
as possible. Hieroglyphs were used to write the ancient
Egyption lanauge. In the beginning hieroglyphic signs
were used to keep records of the king's possessions.
Scribes could easily make these records by drawing a
picture of a cow or a boat followed by a number. But
as the language became more complex more pictures were
needed. Eventually the language consisted of more than
750 individual signs.
A 3" x 2" Mesopotamian Tablet
A 3" x 2" Mesopotamian tablet contained an enciphered
formula for making pottery glaze. Cuneiform signs were
used in the least common syllabic values to attempt
to hide secrets of the formula. About Cuneiform: Pictograms,
or drawings representing actual things, were the basis
for cuneiform writing. Early pictograms resembled the
objects they represented, but through repeated use over
time they began to look simpler, even abstract. These
marks eventually became wedge-shaped ("cuneiform"),
and could convey sounds or abstract concepts.
Hebrew scribes writing down the book of Jeremiah used
a reverse-alphabet simple substitution cipher known
as the ATBASH cipher. Many names of people and places
are believed to have been deliberately obscured in the
Hebrew Bible using this cipher. The ATBASH cipher is
a Hebrew code which substitutes the first letter of
the alphabet for the last and the second letter for
the second last, and so on. This cipher is one of the
few used in the Hebrew language. The cipher itself,
ATBASH, is very similar to the substitution cipher.
A substitution cipher is one where each letter of the
alphabet actually represents another letter. In the
case of the Atbash cipher, the first letter of the alphabet
is substituted for the last, the second for the second
last and so on." I.e., for us in English the letter
A becomes "Z", the letter "B" becomes "Y", the letter
C becomes X, and so on. ATBASH gets it's name from the
fact that in the cipher, A becomes T, B becomes Sh,
and so on, hence ATBSh - ATBASH.
Ancient Greeks invented the “skytale” (rhymes with
Italy), which was a stick wrapped with narrow strips
of papyrus, leather, or parchment. The message was written
on the wrapping; then the strip was removed and passed
to the messenger. Only if the receiver had the same
size tube would they be able to read the message. From
indirect evidence, the scytale was first mentioned by
the Greek poet Archilochus who lived in the 7th century
BC. Other Greek and Roman writers during the following
centuries also mentioned it, but it was not until Apollonius
of Rhodes (middle of the 3rd century BC) that a clear
indication of its use as a cryptographic device appeared.
A description of how it operated is not known from before
PlutarchMestrius Plutarch (c. 120) was a Greek historian/
biographer and essayist. Born in the small town of Chaeronea,
in the Greek region known as Boeotia, probably during
the reign of the Roman Emperor Claudius, Mestrius Plutarch
travelled widely in the Medite (50-120 AD):.
Julius Caesar Bust Statue
Julius Caesar's simple substitution cipher. This type
of encryption is one of the simplest and most widely
known encryption techniques. Each letter of the plaintext
is replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions
further down the alphabet. For example, a shift of 4
would move A to E, B to F, etc. Such as:
Plain: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Cipher: DEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABC
The Caesar cipher is named after Julius Caesar, who,
according to Suetonius, used it with a shift of three
to protect messages of military significance.
Frequency Analysis leading to techniques for breaking
monoalphabetic substitution ciphers: most likely motivated
due to textual analysis of the Koran. It has been suggested
that close textual study of the Qur'an first brought
to light that Arabic has a characteristic letter frequency.
Its use spread, and was so widely used by European states
by the Renaissance that several schemes were invented
by cryptographers to defeat it. These included homophones,
polyalphabetic substitution and polygraphic substitution
schemes. Frequency analysis is based on the fact that
in any given stretch of a language, letters and combinations
of letters occur with varying frequencies. In the English
language for example, E is the most common letter, while
X is rare.
Leon Alberti invented the cipher disk and cryptographic
key. Alberti's cipherdisk was polyalphabetic, meaning
that a new alphabet could be created each time by turning
the disk. This type of disk was the only method of using
this type of cipher until the 16th century. Alberti
thought his cipher was unbreakable. This assumption
was based on his inquiries into frequency analysis,
which is the most effective method of deciphering monoalphabetic
cryptograms. Given enough cryptotext, one can use the
frequency of the letters in reference to a normal distribution
to find the shift and solve the cryptogram. This system
fails to solve polyalphabetic cryptograms, however,
since the letter distribution is garbled.
The Vigenere Cipher is polyalphabetic, meaning that
instead of there being a one-to-one relationship between
each letter and its substitute, there is a one-to-many
relationship between each letter and its substitutes.
The encipherer chooses a keyword and repeats it until
it matches the length of the plaintext, for example,
the keyword "XRAMP":
XRAMPXRAMPXRAMPXRA...
Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded for plotting against
Queen Elizabeth using mono-alphabetic substitution ciphers.
Mary was condemned on the basis of evidence obtained
from enciphered messages cracked by Tomas Phelippes.
Phelippes was able to crack a cipher used by Mary and
conspirators who wanted to place her on the English
throne, even though the cipher contained nulls and codewords.
The Great Cipher: A nomenclator cipher developed by
the Rossignols. Each number stood for a French syllable
rather than single letters.
The Telegraph showed that electrostatically generated
signals which stood for letters of the alphabet could
be sent a long way through a wire with the circuit being
completed through the Earth. The original telegraph
used 26 wires; one for each letter of the alphabet.
A Set of three cipher texts:
- One allegedly stating the location of a buried treasure
of gold and silver estimated to be worth over $20
Million
- One describing the content of the treasure
- And one listing the names of the finders' next of
kin.
Samuel Morse creates Morse code: Morse code represents
letters, numbers and punctuation marks by means of a
code signal sent intermittently. This is an early form
of digital communication. It uses to states(on and off)
composed into five symbols: dit('), dah(-), short gap
(between letters), medium gap (between words) and long
gap (between sentences). Morse code differed from the
telegraph in the fact that it sent code for each letter
on a single wire rather than a wire for each letter.
In 1863, the European form of Morse code was created.
Prussian major named Kasiski proposed a method for
breaking a Vigenere cipher that consisted of finding
the length of the keyword and then dividing the message
into that many simple substitution cryptograms. Frequency
analysis could then be used to solve the resulting simple
substitutions.
Auguste Kerckhoff is best known for a series of two
essay she published in 1883 in the Journal of Military
Science. These articles surveyed the state of the art
in military cryptography and included many pieces of
advice and rules of thumb, including his famous six
principals of practical cipher design.
The most well known is the second of his six principals,
otherwise known as Kerckhoff's Law. This law states
that "There is no secrecy in the algorithm - It is all
in the key.".
The Zimmerman telegram was a secret telegram which
included proposalsfor a German alliance with Mexico.
The telegram was intercepted and decrypted by the British
Government.
The German ADFGVX cipher was the first cipher used
by the German Army during World War I. This was a fractioning
transposition cipher which combined a modified Polybius
square with a single columnar transposition used to
encode a 36 letter alphabet (26 letters plus 10 digits).
Arthur Scherbius designed the Enigma - a device which
allowed businesses to communicate confidential documents
without having to resort to clumsy and slow codebooks.
The device consisted of many rotors turning on a common
axis. The rotors had numbers 1 through 26 marked on
the edge, or the alphabet A-Z, and were equipped with
26 electrical contacts (one for each letter of the alphabet)
so that when a letter was pressed, the output would
depend on the position of the rotor and its cross wiring.
Within the same year, the Enigma was put to use; most
famously by Nazi Germany before and during WWII.
The Navajo Code Talkers have been credited with saving
countless lives and hastening the end of the war. The
Code Talker's primary job was to talk and transmit information
on tactics, troop movements, orders and other vital
battlefield information via telegraphs and radios in
their native dialect. A major advantage of the code
talker system was its speed. The method of using Morse
code often took hours where as, the Navajos handled
a message in minutes. It has been said that if was not
for the Navajo Code Talker's, the Marines would have
never taken Iwo Jima.
The Navajo's unwritten language was understood by
fewer than 30 non-Navajo's at the time of WWII. The
size and complexity of the language made the code extremely
difficult to comprehend, much less decipher. It was
not until 1968 that the code became declassified by
the US Government.
The Captain Midnight radio show featured the "Code-O-Graph"
at the end of each transmission. Fans could write into
one of the program's sponsors to get the Code-O-Graph
and then decode the secret messages from the program.
This is a classic example of a cipher disk except that
it used numbers instead of letters.
Claude Shannon Unicity Concept
Claude Shannon published a paper on his Unicity Concept.
The Unicity Concept measures the least amount of plaintext
which can be uniquely deciphered from the corresponding
ciphertext, given unbounded resouces by the attacker.
The Integrated Circuit chip consisted of at least
two interconnected semiconductor devices; mainly transistors
and resistors. Many scholars belive that the digital
revolution brought about by integrated circuits was
one of the most significant occurrences in the history
of mankind.
US Navy - The start of John Walker's 17 year espionage
of copying keys and sending them to the Soviets. It
is estimated that he helped the Soviet Union garner
more than one million messages and compromised US codes.
British Intelligence Symbol
James Ellis, Clifford Cocks, Malcolm Williamson stated
as the original inventors of public key cryptography.
This fact was originally kept secret until after 1976
when Diffie and Hellman take credit for discovering
PKC.
Horst Feistel created Lucifer at IBM's Thomas J. Watson
Laboratory. Lucifer was the name given to several of
the earliest civilian block ciphers and was a direct
precursor to the Data Encryption Standard.
David Bell and Len LaPadula create the Bell-LaPadula
Security Policy Model in response to US Airforce converns
over the security of time sharing mainframe systems.
The Bell-LaPadula model is a formal state transition
model of computer security that describes a set of access
control rules.
A system is defined as "secure" when all access controls
are in accordance with a specific security policy.
Hash algorythms are typically used to provide a digital
fingerprint of a file's contents to ensure that the
file has not been altered by an intruder or virus. They
generally help to preserve the integrity of a file.
Microsoft is formed by Bill Gates and Paul Allen
Microsoft was founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul
Allen. Microsoft was founded quickly after the introduction
of the first personal computer. Microsoft was able to
successfully promote and sale BASIC, which turned out
to be the first personal computer language for the Micro
Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) Altair.
More
details on the founding of Microsoft
Whitefield Diffie and Martin Hellman Publish Public-Key
Cryptography
Whitfield Diffie & Martin Hellman publish Public-key
Cryptography. This asymmetric key cryptosystem was known
as the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, and was the first
published practical method for establishing a secret
key through unprotected communications channels without
a prior shared secret.
During this time, US Navy ships would sail with a
forklift full of NSA distributed keys printed on paper
tape or punch cards.
Seal of the US Department of Defense
The Department of Defense published "Trusted Computer
System Evaluation Criteria" otherwise known as the "Orange
Book". The Orange Book was the benchmark for systems
produced almost two decades later, and Orange Book classifications
such as C2 provide a shorthand for the base level of
security features of modern operating systems.
Based on transactions, the Clark-Wilson model is used
for systems where integrity is enforced across both
the Operating System and the application. The Clark-Wilson
model extended to cover separation of duty in 1993.
Ronald Rivest Creates RC4
Ronald Rivest creates RC4, or "Rivest Cipher 4". RC4
generates a pseudorandom stream of bits which for encryption,
is combined with plaintext using XOR. To generate the
keystream, the cipher makes use of a secret internal
state containing a permutation of all 256 bites and
two 8 bit index pointers. The permutation is initialized
with a variable length key and generated using PRGA.
Kerberos was invented at MIT. Kerberos is a network
authentication protocol designed to provide strong authentication
for client/server applications by using secret key cryptography.
The Chinese Wall model combines commercial discretion
with legally enforceable mandatory controls required
in the operation of many financial services. The Chinese
Wall policy states that people are only allowed access
to information which is not held to conflict with any
other information that they may already posses.
Zimmermann publishes PGP. Originally created in response
to US Senate Bill 266 which was designed to force manufacturers
of secure communications to provide a "back door" by
which the US Goverment would be able to read those communications.
The bill was ultimately defeated.
Otherwise known as the "Clipper Chip" the significant
feature of EES is its so-called key escrow method of
enabling eavesdropping by authorized government agencies
under certain circumstances. The program was ended due
to public concerns over the invasion of privacy.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation used a brute force
attack to crack the DES Algorithm called Deep Crack,
testing 90 billion keys per second - cracking a 56 bit
key in 4.5 days.
Distributed.net used the same brute force concept
as Deep Crack, testing 250 billion keys per second.
Bureau of Industry and Security
Restrictions on export regulations for cryptographic
material were dramatically relaxed. Any cryptographic
product is exportable under a license exception unless
the end users are foreign governments or embargoed destinations
(Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Serbia, Sudan,
Syria, and Taliban-controlled areas of Afganistan)
Former FBI Director Louis Freeh testified before the
9/11 Commission calling for new laws against the public
use of encryption.
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