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“
To attack each system--first Red, then Purple--the American codebreakers needed to build their own bootleg versions of the Japanese machines, reverse engineering them based on nothing but educated guesses from analyzing the garbled messages they produced. It was a task akin to building a watch if you have never seen a watch before, simply by listening to an audio recording of the ticking and clicking of its gears.
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― The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies
― The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies
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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
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”
― The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies
― The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies
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