Cryptology Quotes

making yourself understood to another person is essentially a problem of cryptology.

Cryptology used to be the realm of linguists. Now it’s dominated by the geeks.” She said this proudly, as if she was one among them. “We’re going to rule the world, you know?” What Holly didn’t understand was that when she said things like this, she didn’t sound like a geek—she sounded like a Valkyrie.

Driving home, I heard the explosion and thought it was a new story born. But, Adrian, it’s the same old story, whispered past the same false teeth. How can we imagine a new language when the language of the enemy keeps our dismembered tongues tied to his belt? How can we imagine a new alphabet when the old jumps off billboards down into our stomachs? Adrian, what did you say? I want to rasp into sober cryptology and say something dynamic but tonight is my laundry night. How do we imagine a new life when a pocketful of quarters weighs our possibilities down?

I want to rasp into sober cryptology and say something dynamic but tonight is my laundry night. How do we imagine a new life when a pocketful of quarters weighs our possibilities down?

The multiple human needs and desires that demand privacy among two or more people in the midst of social life must inevitably lead to cryptology wherever men thrive and wherever they write. Cultural diffusion seems a less likely explanation for its occurrence in so many areas, many of them distant and isolated.

That’s the incomparable beauty of the cryptological art. A little bit of math can accomplish what all the guns and barbed wire can’t: a little bit of math can keep a secret.

Much of the history of cryptology of this time is a patchwork, a crazy quilt of unrelated items, sprouting, flourishing, withering. Only toward the Western Renaissance does the accreting knowledge begin to build up a momentum. The story of cryptology during these years is, in other words, exactly the story of mankind.

making yourself understood to another person is essentially a problem of cryptology. You reduce the noise of the channel between you (instead of noise, Shannon called it “information entropy”) in a way that can be quantified. And the method for reducing the noise—for recovering messages that would otherwise be lost or garbled—is decryption. Viewed through Shannon’s theory, intimate communication is a cryptologic process. When you fall in love, you develop a compact encoding to share mental states more efficiently, cut noise, and bring your beloved closer. All lovers, in this light, are codebreakers. And with America going to war, the two young codebreakers at Riverbank were about to become lovers.

MAGIC secret. It was a prime example of the brutal choices that codebreakers must live with. Do you take risks to keep a secret that may save hundreds of thousands of future lives, or do you expose the secret to save a small number of lives right now? William once referred to this broad dilemma as “cryptologic schizophrenia,” adding, “What to do? Thus far, no real psychiatric or psychoanalytic cure has been found for the illness.

Between 1917 and 1920, George Fabyan used Riverbank’s vanity press to publish eight pamphlets that described new kinds of codebreaking strategies. These were little books with unassuming titles on plain white covers. Today they are considered to be the foundation stones of the modern science of cryptology. Known as the Riverbank Publications, they “rise up like a landmark in the history of cryptology,” writes the historian David Kahn. “Nearly all of them broke new ground, and mastery of the information they first set forth is still regarded as the prerequisite for a higher cryptologic education.

The association of magic and cryptology was reinforced by other factors. Mysterious symbols were used in such esoteric fields as astrology and alchemy—where each planet and chemical had a special sign, like the circle and arrow for Mars—just as they were in cryptology. Like words in cipher, spells and incantations, such as “abracadabra,” looked like nonsense but in reality were potent with hidden meanings.

Cryptology was born among the Arabs. They were the first to discover and write down the methods of cryptanalysis. The people that exploded out of Arabia in the 600s and flamed over vast areas of the known world swiftly engendered one of the highest civilizations that history had yet seen. Science flowered. Arab medicine and mathematics became the best in the world—from the latter, in fact, comes the word “cipher.

General Joseph O. Mauborgne, who became Chief Signal Officer in October, 1937. Mauborgne had long been interested in cryptology. In 1914, as a young first lieutenant, he achieved the first recorded solution of a cipher known as the Playfair, then used by the British as their field cipher. He described his technique in a 19-page pamphlet that was the first publication on cryptology issued by the United States government. In World War I, he put together several cryptographic elements to create the only theoretically unbreakable cipher, and promoted the first automatic cipher machine, with which the unbreakable cipher was associated. He was among the first to send and receive radio messages in airplanes.

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

The Arabic knowledge of cryptography was fully set forth in the section on cryptology in the Subh al-a ‘sha, an enormous, 14-volume encyclopedia

All this stained cryptology so deeply with the dark hues of esoterism that some of them still persist, noticeably coloring the public image of cryptology. People still think cryptanalysis mysterious. Book dealers still list cryptology under “occult.” And in 1940 the United States conferred upon its Japanese diplomatic cryptanalyses the codename MAGIC.

For almost a thousand years, from before 500 to 1400, the cryptology of Western civilization stagnated.

the most famous of all those who had an acquaintance with cryptology in the Middle Ages was an English customs official, amateur astronomer, and literary genius named Geoffrey Chaucer.

Smart, rabidly paranoid people are the backbone of cryptology,

the conviction in the minds of many people that cryptology is a black art, a form of occultism whose practitioner must, in William F. Friedman’s apt phrase, “perforce commune daily with dark spirits to accomplish his feats of mental jiu-jitsu.

From the early days of its existence, cryptology had served to obscure critical portions of writings dealing with the potent subject of magic—divinations, spells, curses, whatever conferred supernatural powers on its sorcerers. The first faint traces of this appeared in Egyptian cryptography. Plutarch reported that “sundry very ancient oracles were kept in secret writings by the priests” at Delphi. And before the fall of the Roman empire, secret writing was serving as a powerful ally of the necromancers in guarding their art from the profane. One of the most famous magic manuscripts, the so-called Leiden papyrus, discovered at Thebes and written in the third century A.D. in both Greek and a very late form of demotic, a highly simplified version of hieroglyphics, employs cipher to conceal the crucial portions of important recipes.

Cryptology served magical purposes frequently throughout the Middle Ages, and even in the Renaissance was still disguising important parts of alchemical formulas.

cryptology is black magic in itself springs ultimately from a superficial resemblance between cryptology and divination. Extracting an intelligible message from ciphertext seemed to be exactly the same thing as obtaining knowledge by examining the flight of birds, the location of stars and planets, the length and intersections of lines in the hand, the entrails of sheep, the position of dregs in a teacup. In all of these, the wizardlike operator draws sense from grotesque, unfamiliar, and apparently meaningless signs. He makes known the unknown.

they employed a device called the “skytale,” the earliest apparatus used in crypto-logy

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

The Seventh Annual Cryptology Conference.” Tess smiled at the sight. It was pretty amazing that the university was allowing it be held here. Due to its somewhat tainted reputation, cryptozoology

Thus the RSA paper marks the first appearance of a fictional “Bob” who wants to send a message to “Alice.” As trivial as this sounds, these names actually became a de facto standard in future papers outlining cryptologic advances, and the cast of characters in such previously depopulated mathematical papers would eventually be widened to include an eavesdropper dubbed Eve and a host of supporting actors including Carol, Trent, Wiry, and Dave.

General Joseph O. Mauborgne, who became Chief Signal Officer in October, 1937. Mauborgne had long been interested in cryptology. In 1914, as a young first lieutenant, he achieved the first recorded solution of a cipher known as the Playfair, then used by the British as their field cipher. He described his technique in a 19-page pamphlet that was the first publication on cryptology issued by the United States government. In World War I, he put together several cryptographic elements to create the only theoretically unbreakable cipher, and promoted the first automatic cipher machine, with which the unbreakable cipher was associated. He was among the first to send and receive radio messages in airplanes. As

The strength of a cryptographic system usually has less to do with its design than with the way people tend to use it. Humans are the weak link. Instead of changing keys or passwords at regular intervals, we use the same ones over and over, for weeks or months or years. We repeat the same words (such as "secret") at the start of multiple messages, or repeat entire messages multiple times, giving codebreakers a foothold. We choose key phrases that are easy to guess: words related to where we live or work, our occupation, or to whatever project we're working on at the moment. A couple of human mistakes can bring the safest cryptographic system in the world to its knees.

The arguments given against the possibility of miracles are circular; they beg the question by assuming (what is to be proven) that all events have natural causes. This is not only false but is also contrary to science, which has always allowed for intelligent causes (in archeology, forensic science, cryptology, the SETI program, and information theory). And

That fusion was complete in October 2005, with the realignment of cryptology, recently renamed information warfare in the U.S. Navy. The Naval Security Group was decommissioned, its units resubordinated under the Information Operations Directorate of the Naval Network Warfare Command, headquartered in Norfolk, VA.

was obvious to William and many others that there ought to be a centralized cryptologic function in America, one agency that gathered intelligence from wireless signals and broke the codes that must be broken. As an elder in the cryptologic community, a person who had not only invented many of its tools but also built a successful organization within the army to apply those tools, William was involved in these discussions at the highest levels—discussions that would give birth, in 1952, to the National Security Agency. In

understood to another person is essentially a problem of cryptology.