Codebreaking Quotes

“Memories. They are like matryoshka dolls, yes?"
[Lily] looked at Mr. Martin again, brows knit. "What kind of dolls?"
He cupped his hands, then brought them closer together. "They...nest. Nesting dolls? You know them by this name, perhaps?"
"Oh! Yes, of course. ...Memories /are/ like that, to be sure. As soon as you peek at one, another reveals itself, and then another.”
― Roseanna M. White, A Portrait of Loyalty

“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.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies

“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.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies

“Elizebeth raced to stay on top of the shifting codes, the proliferation of patterns. Her worksheets grew weird, beautiful. She filled the grid squares with letters and numbers that made different geometric shapes when you stepped back and looked at the worksheet from a distance. Some of the shapes were parallelograms, some looked like stairs, other like labyrinths. She pulled mischievious letters from the sky and sorted them on the page. The invisible world was all out of whack, misaligned, and she had this set of tricks to knock it back into order.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies

“Over and over again, gazing at what seemed random in the world, Elizebeth founda tiny spot of sense, and then she stood on that spot and invented a system to transform the rest of the landscape all the way out to the horizon, and this is still the process today.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies