The Code Book Quotes

“Ron Rivest, one of the inventors of RSA, thinks that restricting cryptography would be foolhardy: It is poor policy to clamp down indiscriminately on a technology just because some criminals might be able to use it to their advantage. For example, any U.S. citizen can freely buy a pair of gloves, even though a burglar might use them to ransack a house without leaving fingerprints. Cryptography is a data-protection technology, just as gloves are a hand-protection technology. Cryptography protects data from hackers, corporate spies, and con artists, whereas gloves protect hands from cuts, scrapes, heat, cold, and infection. The former can frustrate FBI wiretapping, and the latter can thwart FBI fingerprint analysis. Cryptography and gloves are both dirt-cheap and widely available. In fact, you can download good cryptographic software from the Internet for less than the price of a good pair of gloves.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“if a message protected by quantum cryptography were ever to be deciphered, it would mean that quantum theory is flawed,”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“if N is large enough, it is virtually impossible to deduce p and q from N, and this is perhaps the most beautiful and elegant aspect of the RSA asymmetric cipher.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“the enemy of security: repetition leads to patterns, and cryptanalysts thrive on patterns.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“The first known European book to describe the use of cryptography was written in the thirteenth century by the English Franciscan monk and polymath Roger Bacon. Epistle on the Secret Works of Art and the Nullity of Magic included seven methods for keeping messages secret, and cautioned: “A man is crazy who writes a secret in any other way than one which will conceal it from the vulgar.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“The NSA employs more mathematicians, buys more computer hardware, and intercepts more messages than any other organization in the world.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“Enigma was considered invulnerable, until the Poles revealed its weaknesses.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“like Turing and the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park, the Navajo were ignored for decades. Eventually, in 1968, the Navajo code was declassified, and the following year the code talkers held their first reunion.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“This apparently innocuous observation would lead to the first great breakthrough in cryptanalysis.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“Codebreakers are linguistic alchemists, a mystical tribe attempting to conjure sensible words out of meaningless symbols. The history of codes and ciphers is the story of the centuries-old battle between codemakers and codebreakers, an intellectual arms race that has had a dramatic impact on the course of history.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Secrets Behind Codebreaking

“Quantum cryptography would mark the end of the battle between codemakers and codebreakers, the codemakers emerging victorious, because quantum cryptography is a truly unbreakable system of encryption.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Secrets Behind Codebreaking

“There exists no purer concentration of Americanism than among the First Americans.” The Navajos were so eager to fight that some of them lied about their age, or gorged themselves on bunches of bananas and swallowed great quantities of water in order to reach the minimum weight requirement of 120 pounds.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Secrets Behind Codebreaking

“If each battalion in the Pacific employed a pair of Native Americans as radio operators, secure communication could be guaranteed. This would be much simpler than a mechanical encryption device and much harder to crack.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Secrets Behind Codebreaking

“Most of the codebreakers returned to their civilian lives, sworn to secrecy, unable to reveal their pivotal role in the Allied war effort. While those who had fought conventional battles could talk of their heroic achievements, those who had fought intellectual battles of no less significance had to endure the embarrassment of having to evade questions about their wartime activities.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Secrets Behind Codebreaking

“Enigma decipherments gave the locations of numerous U-boats, but it would have been unwise to attack every single one of them, because a sudden, unexplained increase in successful British attacks would suggest to Germany that its communications were being deciphered.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Secrets Behind Codebreaking

“In April 1977, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman spent Passover at the house of a student, and had consumed significant amounts of Manischewitz wine before returning to their respective homes some time around midnight. Rivest, unable to sleep, lay on his couch reading a mathematics textbook. He began mulling over the question that had been puzzling him for weeks—is it possible to build an asymmetric cipher? Is it possible to find a one-way function that can be reversed only if the receiver has some special information? Suddenly, the mists began to clear and he had a revelation. He spent the rest of that night formalizing his idea, effectively writing a complete scientific paper before daybreak. Rivest had made a breakthrough, but it had grown out of a yearlong collaboration with Shamir and Adleman, and it would not have been possible without them. Rivest finished off the paper by listing the authors alphabetically; Adleman, Rivest, Shamir. The next morning, Rivest handed the paper to Adleman, who went through his usual process of trying to tear it apart, but this time he could find no faults. His only criticism was with the list of authors. “I told Ron to take my name off the paper,” recalls Adleman. “I told him that it was his invention, not mine. But Ron refused and we got into a discussion about it. We agreed that I would go home and contemplate it for one night, and consider what I wanted to do. I went back the next day and suggested to Ron that I be the third author. I recall thinking that this paper would be the least interesting paper that I will ever be on.” Adleman could not have been more wrong. The system, dubbed RSA (Rivest, Shamir, Adleman) as opposed to ARS, went on to become the most influential cipher in modern cryptography.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“In fact, Britain had captured thousands of Enigma machines, and distributed them among its former colonies, who believed that the cipher was as secure as it had seemed to the Germans. The British did nothing to disabuse them of this belief, and routinely deciphered their secret communications in the years that followed. Meanwhile,”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“It has been said that the First World War was the chemists’ war, because mustard gas and chlorine were employed for the first time, and that the Second World War was the physicists’ war, because the atom bomb was detonated. Similarly, it has been argued that the Third World War would be the mathematicians’ war, because mathematicians will have control over the next great weapon of war—information.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“Al-Kindi's technique, known as frequency analysis, shows that it is unnecessary to check each of the billions of potential keys. Instead, it is possible to reveal the contents of a scrambled message simply by analysing the frequency of the characters in the ciphertext.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“In addition to a greater understanding of secular subjects, the invention of cryptanalysis aslo depended on the growth of religious sholarship. Major theological schools were established in Basra, Kufa and Baghdad, where thelogians scrutinized the revelations of Muhammad as contained in the Koran. The theologians were interested in establishing the chronology of the revelations, which they did by counting the frequencies of words contained in each revelation. The theory was that certain words had evolved relatively recently, and hence if a revelation contained a high number of these newer words, this would indicate that it came later in the chronology. Theologians also studied the Hadith, which consists of the Prophet's daily utterances. They tried to demonstrate that each statement was indeed attributable to Muhammad. This was done by studying the etymology of words and the structure of sentences, to test whether particular texts were consistent with the linguistic patterns of the Prophet.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“At the same time as acquiring knowledge, the Islamic civilization was able to disperse it, because it had procured the art of paper-making from the Chinese. The manufacture of paper gave rise to the profession of warraqin, or 'those who handle paper,' human photocopying machines who copied manuscripts and supplied the burgeoning publishing industry. At its peak, tens of thousands of books were published every year, and in just one suburb of Baghdad there were over a hundred bookshops. As well as such classics as Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, these bookshops also sold textbooks on every imaginable subject, and helped to support the most literate and learned society in the world.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“Cryptanalysis could not be invented until a civilization had reached a sufficiently sophisticated level of scholarship in several disciplines, including mathematics, statistics, and linguistics. The Muslim civilization provided an ideal cradle for cryptanalysis, because Islam demands justice in all spheres of human activity, and achieving this requires knowledge, or ilm. Every Muslim is obliged to pursue knowledge in all its forms, and the economic success of the Abbasid caliphate meant that scholars had the time, money, and materials required to fulfil their duty. They endeavoured to acquire knowledge of previous civilizations by obtaining Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, Farsi, Syriac, Armenian, Hebrew and Roman texts and translating them into Arabic. In 815, the Caliph of Ma'mun established in Baghdad the Bait al-Hikmah ('House of Wisdom'), a library and centre for translation.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“Had the Arabs merely been familiar with the use of the mono-alphabetic substitution cipher, they would not warrant a significant mention in any history of cryptography. However, in addition to employing ciphers, the Arab scholars were also capable of destroying ciphers. They in fact invented cryptanalysis, the science of unscrambling a message without knowledge of the key. While the cryptographer develops new methods of secret writing, it is the cryptanalyst who struggles to find weaknesses in these methods in order to break into secret messages. Arabian cryptanalysts succeeded in finding a method for breaking the monoalphabetic substitution cipher, a cipher that had remained invulnerable for several centuries.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“Rejewski had no idea of the day key, and he had no idea which message keys were being chosen, but he did know that they resulted in this table of relationships. Had”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“The French had handed the information from Schmidt to the Poles because they believed it to be of no value, but the Poles had proved them wrong.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“Turing’s secret had been exposed, and his sexuality was now public knowledge. The British Government withdrew his security clearance. He was forbidden to work on research projects relating to the development of the computer. He was forced to consult a psychiatrist and had to undergo hormone treatment, which made him impotent and obese. Over the next two years he became severely depressed, and on June 7, 1954, he went to his bedroom, carrying with him a jar of cyanide solution and an apple. Twenty years earlier he had chanted the rhyme of the Wicked Witch: “Dip the apple in the brew, Let the sleeping death seep through.” Now he was ready to obey her incantation. He dipped the apple in the cyanide and took several bites. At the age of just forty-two, one of the true geniuses of cryptanalysis committed suicide.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“Jack Good, a veteran of Bletchley, commented: “Fortunately the authorities did not know that Turing was a homosexual. Otherwise we might have lost the war.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“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.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“Because a quantum computer deals with 1’s and 0’s that are in a quantum superposition, they are called quantum bits, or qubits (pronounced “cubits”). The advantage of qubits becomes even clearer when we consider more particles.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“it requires a great deal of time, effort and money to create a random key. The best random keys are created by harnessing natural physical processes, such as radioactivity, which is known to exhibit truly random behavior. The cryptographer could place a lump of radioactive material on a bench, and detect its emissions with a Geiger counter. Sometimes the emissions follow each other in rapid succession, sometimes there are long delays—the time between emissions is unpredictable and random. The cryptographer could then connect a display to the Geiger counter, which rapidly cycles through the alphabet at a fixed rate, but which freezes momentarily as soon as an emission is detected.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography