Cryptography

The History and Mathematics of Codes and Code Breaking

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The New Normal

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On September 5, 2015

In Student Posts

In Hello Future Pastebin Readers, Quinn Norton talks about how everyone who has access to technology is essentially the same in that none of their personal information and data, no matter how securely uploaded or downloaded, is actually private. This particularly interests me because today’s society is so heavily centered around the distribution of information globally, and this feeling of interconnectedness provides a false sense of security to many people, because in reality, they can have no idea what other people are possibly doing with their data.

The article also exposes readers to the idea that as we progress towards the more modern and technologically-oriented society, more people will learn how to hack, and the status quo will shift to a society where people must become comfortable knowing that privately posting anything online is the same as posting it to the public. On this topic, Norton furthermore brings up the interesting prospect that we should embrace the idea of performing as if “on stage” whenever we do anything online, which ultimately may help the world move towards a more open society, technologically speaking.

The Correlation Between Technology and Self-Taught Cryptography

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On August 31, 2015

In Student Posts

When the frequency analysis first emerged as a tool to decrypt substitution cyphers, it was the epitome of modern technology at the time.  Under the growing Islamic rule of the Arab nations there was, for the first time in history, the opportunity for the collection of mass amounts of diverse knowledge in one place and one time. Revolutionary at the time, in modern society this same concept of data collection is relatively commonplace. Worldwide schooling systems teach the basics of linguistics, mathematics, and statistics to children from young ages, giving them the platform upon which it is easier to compute the complicated nature of cryptography. Even more recently, information of all types has become increasingly available to any who have access to the internet. A place for data collection and collaboration of thought like no where else, the internet has revolutionized cryptography once again. No longer is a formal education entirely necessary to access the tools needed to decipher codes. One can simply study complex theories of statistical analysis taught to them through Yahoo Answers, or watch explanations of multivariable calculus on YouTube. While information is still being gathered, just as it was in ancient Arab nations, it is no longer limited to a single society, or even to formal education. There is no reason to say that the modern codebreaker is somehow inherently more adept at decryption; rather the skills which are needed to decrypt are accessible without advanced study.  Thanks to the internet, the only requirement in cryptography is the desire to seek out the tools necessary to decrypt.

A Developing Familiarity Throughout History

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On August 30, 2015

In Student Posts

Fundamental development in the disciplinary topics of mathematics, statistics, and linguistics was procured from a comparative ground-level hundreds of years ago as opposed to what we have unearthed today. The advantages and resources currently available to the vast public are, of course, the most they have ever been in history. This goes without saying. “Discovering” tactics to break codes and ciphers that were once considered the most advanced techniques by exceptional cryptanalysts is certainly not as easy a task without the long history of code breaking (in the colloquial meaning of the term) that had come before us.

The ability to learn methods such as frequency analysis from a quick Google search is much less arduous a task than inventing them without any previous notion of such a possibility. Even assuming that today’s amateur cryptanalysts aren’t explicitly searching “how to’s” from public databases, the idea of frequency analysis and any analogous general form of use is very comfortable and familiar. Perhaps teachers from grade school distributed puzzles aimed to unscramble words and phrases or your classmate used a simple cipher as a way to ask out their prom date. Experiencing or seeing a number of similar events throughout our lives inevitably ingrains the technique somewhere in the back of our minds, at least implicitly.

Noting the above, it is truly incredible to acknowledge how commonplace once incredible and cutting-edge discoveries are considered in the present day. This will always be observed, even beyond subjects regarding cryptography, as a natural progression of time.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

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On August 30, 2015

In Student Posts

It is curious to think of how the world was just one hundred years ago. So many things that are now obvious were unknown or shrouded in mystery. In 1915, barely anything was known about heredity and the cellular functions that were involved in it. Now, we have mapped the entire human genome and can even change DNA. In Newton’s time, gravity was a concept that hadn’t been explored. Now, it is an obvious fact, one that forms the most basic aspect of sciences that have now advanced to ever-increasing complexity. What is gravity when compared to the Higgs boson?

In this same way, the discoveries made by cryptanalysts of centuries past have now become obvious to us. This is by no fault of theirs—without civilization’s ability to analyze statistics and linguistics and apply mathematical concepts, decrypting encrypted messages could never have been attempted.

The thing is, civilization didn’t stop there. It continued to grow and make new discoveries while standing on the foundation laid by its predecessors. Discoveries of algebraic concepts that excited prominent scholars hundreds of years ago are now taught in middle school classes to unappreciative twelve-year-olds. They are no longer new and complicated and exciting, but old news, taken for granted, never thought of unless they are used for the springboard into some novel inquiry.

Another aspect to consider is the advance of technology and information. Doing statistics by hand is a painstaking process that can now easily be bypassed by calculators and software. In addition, so many more people have access to information now than they used to, whether that be in a classroom or on the Internet. Especially when considering the Internet, where any question can be answered easily in a matter of seconds, it is not all that surprising that amateur cryptanalysts can “wing it.”

This is not to diminish the strategies implemented by older cryptanalysts. Rather, it is to show how far we have been able to come since their time because of the nature of their discoveries. As Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

The Beginning of an Era of Secrecy

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On August 29, 2015

In Student Posts

Imagine for a moment that everything you’ve ever hidden is completely public. Everyone has access to your private emails and your bank account information, among other things. This would be life without cryptography.

Cryptography is hiding the meaning of a message, and it is typically used in most forms of modern communication. In The Code Book, the author, Simon Singh notes that secret writing has been a part of human civilization since the fifth century (Singh 4), but it was widely accepted that the most typically used cipher of ancient times, the substitution cipher (Singh 13), was impossible to crack until the 8th century when the Abbasid caliphate’s place as a center of learning allowed it to become the homeplace of cryptanalysis (Singh 16).

Singh defines cryptanalysis as “the science of unscrambling a message without knowledge of the key” (Singh 15). As Singh states on page 15, cryptanalysis was only possible in the beginning due to the Muslim civilization achieving “a level of scholarship in several disciplines, including mathematics, statistics, and linguistics”.

The important debate, though, is whether or not this level of scholarship is still necessary in today’s society. I am of the opinion that, although our society’s era of secrecy necessitated well-trained cryptanalysts, this is no longer the case. As our class demonstrated on only the second day, breaking of the more common codes is fairly simple for most modern humans. The difference, I believe, lies in the fact that in ancient times, education and widespread knowledge had not progressed to the point it has now reached. The internet, as a portal to almost all human knowledge, has made it simple for anyone to pursue any knowledge or expertise that they desire.

Without modern technology, and modern education, I am of the opinion that intense training would still be required to become a cryptanalyst. However, due to our civilization’s widespread resources, it has become much easier for individuals to discover and crack codes and ciphers on their own.  Cryptology began as a secretive science, but has become an integral part of modern society, and as such we are all cryptologists in some form or another.

The Security of Email and the Privacy

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On December 3, 2014

In Student Posts

Now I just collect some information and have not started my paper yet, so I find that I will take a huge amount of effort to deal with this paper.  In this paper, I want to talk about the security of the emails during the international communications (like the legal access of the government, the physical location of the service and so on) and the strength of the passwords of emails accounts. There are two most challenging parts of this paper. The first part is to get the way how government access the email because I am not familiar with the internet. I need to search more information and spend more time to understand the process. The second part is to understand the way the hackers use to break the emails accounts and the method the emails use to keep the passwords of the accounts safe. These need I spend a lot of time on mathematics and I might also need to explain them clearly in my paper. The  more enjoyable part in this paper is to think about the method to improve the strength of the passwords of the email accounts and to keep people’s email accounts safe. This part is very useful and interesting. To improve my paper, I still need to search more resources and organize the arguments clearly.

Tor is the key to online security

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On September 11, 2014

In Student Posts

Online privacy is a major concern for college students and Internet users in general. Users of the Internet put so much information on it from credit card information, communication, and personal information. There are various steps that users can take to protect their online security. One method of protection is the use of Tor. Tor is an open network and free software. This software allows users to be hidden, ambiguous, and safe while on the Internet. It enables users to be protected from network surveillance or analysis that may be imposed upon them on the normal Internet by various agencies, corporations, or individuals. Using software like this allows the user to be completely safe through routing layers and encryptions.  This method of privacy seems the most straightforward and easy when it comes to online security. It is a simple step of downloading and using the software that will protect an Internet user. College students today do not have the time to mess with various modes of privacy servers on the Internet and Tor allows students to use single software and receive protection. This simplicity alone is a compelling reason to use Tor when on the Internet. Tor allows students to have online privacy and is quite simple; this is just one step that a user can take to protect their online privacy.

Do your research

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On September 11, 2014

In Student Posts

I think the best advice for college students using the internet is to just be aware of the amount of privacy you have. I know there are many of us who think they are perfectly safe on the internet because their profiles are set as private, and they don’t post about where they are going to be and they only talk about personal issues on secure, private messages, and they don’t post their private photos onto the internet. Issues with their privacy can be found quite quickly with a little bit of research. The article “The 5 Biggest Online Privacy Threats of 2013”, for examples, tells us that your phone stores the location each picture is taken on, and unless you turn this off or remove this information, anyone on the internet can get this information from the photos you post. Also, as we have seen recently with the big celebrity leak, even the data on your phone can be retrieved without access to your phone, as this information is stored in a cloud database. Emails and your messages on social media, as private as they seem, can be accessed by the NSA and if they see fit. While I know the average college student isn’t really doing anything on their email that would be of interest to the NSA, the fact that they have access shows that other people could gain access if they really wanted to. The article “5 Essential Privacy Tools for the Next Crypto War” is a great resource for college students as it gives simple, more secure encrypted alternatives for file sharing, emailing, and messaging services that you don’t need to be tech savvy or computer whizzes to use. These small steps could help all of us avoid embarrassing leaks of personal information or stealing of data from our computers.

Blog Assignment 1: New Revelations on the Potential Weaknesses of Cryptography

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On August 26, 2014

In Student Posts

Before this course, when I thought of cryptography I primarily thought of advanced groups and organizations who made unbreakable codes so that nobody else would ever know the information they were communicating except for the people they were communicating to. However, this is definitely not the entire story. First, most everyone in society uses cryptography in some way in their lives. A lot of the time people aren’t even aware that they are utilizing cryptography, primarily when they are online. I was previously unaware of how much cryptography was involved in things online such as passwords and other sensitive information. I’m glad though that online passwords and other information gets encrypted before it is sent as if it weren’t then it would be extremely easy for anyone to get your sensitive information.

Now the other main thing which my eyes were opened to was the potential weakness in encryption. Before I thought that for the most part, codes weren’t ever cracked or figured out by people other than those that the messages are to. The story of Queen Mary taught me otherwise. While there are over 4*10^26 different ways to encrypt using a basic substitution cipher, it is not always that difficult to figure out the encryption methods. Cryptanalysis and its methods are new topics to me, but when thinking about them, I had even used some of them in the past (primarily frequency analysis). The main point however is that any encryption method can be figured out and thus no method of encryption is 100% secure. Other weaknesses include that you can’t make an encryption method so complex that your recipient cannot understand the message, and it isn’t necessarily possible to tell if someone else has figured out your encryption method. Particularly the latter is a major weakness as one’s method of encryption can in fact be used against them and this was an interesting possibility which had never occurred to me before. Cryptography can be extremely useful and has its advantages, but it is not without disadvantages either.

The Costs of Privacy

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On October 9, 2012

In Student Posts

Cary Doctorow’s Little Brother tells the story of Marcus Yallow, a high school student who rebels against the Department ofHomeland Security for violating his rights to privacy.  Marcus goes to the extent of creating a new secure Internet, hacking transportation systems, and much more to protect himself and others from the DHS.  I found Chapter 3 and 4 to be most interesting because Doctorow directly questions whether our rights to privacy are more or less important that protecting our country.  The unreal treatment Marcus faces while being interrogated changed my opinion over the topic entirely.  When Marcus was interrogated by the lady, why did Marcus feel so strongly over maintaining his privacy?  At first, I felt Marcus’ innocence was more important, and since he had nothing to hide he should hand over his phone.  I tried to put myself in his position and then realized I would feel uncomfortable if I was forced to hand over my text messages and emails to a random stranger.  Marcus maybe felt that because he was innocent he should continue to refuse to give his phone up.

Our right to privacy is a central theme in Little Brother, and is constantly questioned throughout the novel.  It is this right that has pushed cryptography to even larger extents, including securer methods of sending information on the Internet or keeping your information private entirely.  Surely, Google and Facebook use information for advertisements and other services, however, this is information that I’ve openly displayed to the public.  I have willingly put this information on the Web, knowing that it will not be private anymore.  Should any stranger attempt to access other private information, then my right to privacy has been violated.  In Marcus’ case, he faced the latter situation, and retained his privacy.  Ultimately, Marcus took a stand to end violations of this right, due to one instance of injustice.  As terrorism continues to rise, the government has increased its control over private information through phone taps and keyword tracking.  Should government control continue to increase, the people will have to decide if the costs of retaining privacy are too great.

Image: “Keep Out from Francisco Huguenin Uhlfelder,” by Francisco, Flickr (CC)

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