The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography
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Had the train arrived a few minutes early, they would have waved each other goodbye, having made no progress on the problem of key distribution.
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Checking the complete sequence is clearly unwise, and it is also unnecessary. Instead, Alice merely has to pick 75 of the digits at random and check just these.
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Because these 75 digits have been openly discussed by Alice and Bob, they must be discarded, and their onetime pad is thus reduced from 1,075 to 1,000 binary digits.
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To summarize, quantum cryptography is a system that ensures the security of a message by making it hard for Eve to read accurately a communication between Alice and Bob. Furthermore, if Eve tries to eavesdrop then Alice and Bob will be able to detect her presence. Quantum cryptography therefore allows Alice and Bob to exchange and agree upon a onetime pad in complete privacy, and thereafter they can use this as a key to encrypt a message.
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(1) Begin by counting up the frequencies of all the letters in the ciphertext.
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(2) If the correlation is sympathetic with English, but the plaintext does not reveal itself immediately, which is often the case, then focus on pairs of repeated letters.
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(3) If the ciphertext contains spaces between words, then try to identify words containing just one, two or three letters.
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(4) If possible, tailor the table of frequencies to the message you are trying to decipher.
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(5) One of the most useful skills for a cryptanalyst is the ability to identify words, or even entire phrases, based on experience or sheer guesswork.
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In this case you are faced not with a substitution cipher, but with a transposition cipher. All the letters do represent themselves, but they are in the wrong positions.
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The main cause of concern is that the text being studied is enormous: in a large enough text, it is hardly surprising that by varying both the starting place and the size of the jump, sensible phrases can be made to appear.
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Furthermore, Hebrew texts are bound to be particularly rich in EDLSs, because they are largely devoid of vowels. This means that interpreters can insert vowels as they see fit, which makes it easier to extract predictions.
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Unfortunately, the Under Secretary complained that the system was too complicated for use in battle conditions, whereupon Wheatstone stated that he could teach the method to boys from the nearest elementary school in 15 minutes. “That is very possible,” replied the Under Secretary, “but you could never teach it to attachés.”
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It can be attacked by looking for the most frequently occurring digraphs in the ciphertext, and assuming that they represent the commonest digraphs in English: th, he, an, in, er, re, es.
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answer is that A, D, F, G, V and X are highly dissimilar from one another when translated into Morse dots and dashes, so this choice of letters minimizes the risk of errors during transmission.
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We would probably be correct in assuming that the first ciphertext contains the word the somewhere, and so cryptanalysis begins by assuming that the entire message consists of a series of the’s.
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Linear A, a Minoan script, has defied all attempts at decipherment, partly due to a paucity of material. Etruscan does not suffer from this problem, with over 10,000 inscriptions available for study, but it has also baffled the world’s greatest scholars. Iberian, another pre-Roman script, is equally unfathomable.
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The signs are not handmade impressions, but were made using a variety of stamps, making this the world’s oldest example of typewriting.
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However, a typewritten document implies mass production, so the hope is that archaeologists will eventually discover a hoard of similar disks, and shed light on this intractable script.
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One of the great challenges outside Europe is the decipherment of the Bronze Age script of the Indus civilization, which can be found on thousands of seals dating from the third millennium B.C.
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It implies that literacy was not restricted to the elite, and raises the question as to what was being advertised. The most likely answer is that it was part of a promotional campaign for the king, and if the identity of the king can be established, then the billboard could provide a way into the rest of the script.
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However, there is a neat trick for calculating exponentials in modular arithmetic. We know that, since 7 = 4 + 2 + 1, 887 (mod 187) = [884 (mod 187) × 882 (mod 187) × 881 (mod 187)] (mod 187)
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We know that exponentials in modular arithmetic are one-way functions, so it is very difficult to work backward from C = 11 and recover the original message, M.
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She calculates a special number, d, the decryption key, otherwise known as her private key. The
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e × d = 1 (mod (p-1) × (q-1))
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Deducing the value of d is not straightforward, but a technique known as Euclid’s algorithm allows Alice to find d quickly and easily.)
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