Cryptography

Cryptography, the science of encoding communications so that only the

intended recipient can understand them, is ancient. In almost every
civilization, cryptography appeared almost as soon as there was writing.
For example, in 1500 B.C.E. a Mesopotamian scribe, using cuneiform signs
that had different syllabic interpretations (akin to spelling "sh" as "ti," as
in nation), disguised a formula for pottery glazes. According to the Greek
historian Herodotus, in the fifth century B.C.E. a Greek at the Persian
court used steganography, or hiding one message within another, to send
a letter urging revolt against the Persians. In the fourth century B.C.E. the
Spartans developed a transposition algorithm that relied on wrapping a
sheet of papyrus around a wooden staff; in the same period, the Indian
political classic the Arthasastra urged cryptanalysis as a means of
obtaining intelligence. In the fifteenth century C.E., the Arabic
encyclopedia, the Subh al-a 'sha, included a sophisticated discussion of
cryptanalysis using frequency distributions.

The increasing use of digitized information and the rise of the Internet has
made cryptography a daily tool for millions of people today. People use
cryptography when they purchase an item via the World Wide Web, when
they call on a European (GSM) cell phone, or when they make a
withdrawal from a bank machine. Cryptography provides confidentiality
(assurance that an eavesdropper will not be able to understand the
communication), authenticity (proof of the message's origin), and
integrity (guarantee that the message has not been tampered with in
transit). Modern communications— phone, fax, or e-mail—are frequently
in digital form (0's and 1's), and the unencrypted string of bits, or
plaintext, is transformed into ciphertext by an encryption algorithm.

There are two parts to any encryption system: the algorithm for doing the
transformation and a secret piece of information that specifies the
particular transformation (called the key). (In the Spartan system
described earlier, the key is the width of the wooden staff. If someone
were to intercept an encrypted message, unless the interceptor had a
staff of the correct width, all the spy would see would be a confused
jumble of letters.) Each user has a personal key. This private chunk of
information enables many people to use the same cryptosystem, yet each
individual's communications are confidential.

In modern cryptography the encryption algorithm is public and all secrecy

resides in the key. Researchers can study the cryptosystem, and if they
are unable to break the system, this helps establish confidence in the
algorithm's security.

In theory an eavesdropper should be unable to determine significant

information from an intercepted ciphertext. The Caesar cipher ,
developed by the Roman general Julius Caesar (c. 100–44 B.C.E., shifts
each letter three to the right ("a" is encrypted as "D," "b" becomes "E,"
"z" becomes "C," and so on), and fails this test. Indeed, systems which
replace letters of the alphabet by others in a fixed way—called simple
substitution ciphers—do not produce random-looking output. As any
Scrabble player knows, letters do not appear equally often in English text.
For example, "e" occurs 13 percent of the time, "t" 9 percent, and so on.
If "W" crops up as 13 percent of the ciphertext, it is a likely bet that W is
substituting for e. The complex patterns of a language provide grist for
the cryptanalyst , who studies such characteristics as the frequency of
each letter's appearance at the beginning and end of a word and the
frequency of occurrence of pairs of letters, triples, etc. If a message is
encrypted under a simple substitution cipher, a trained cryptanalyst can
usually crack the message with only twenty-five letters of the ciphertext.

The development of polyalphabetic ciphers in fifteenth-and sixteenth-

century Europe signified a major advancement in encryption. These
ciphers employ several substitution alphabets and the key is a codeword
that indicates which alphabet to use for each letter of the plaintext. Both
polyalphabetic ciphers and transposition ciphers, in which the letters of
the plaintext trade positions with one another, also fall prey to frequency
analysis.

Despite its fame, for 4,000 years cryptography remained relatively

unimportant in the context of wartime communications. The advent of
radio changed that. Radio technology gave military commanders an
unparalleled means to communicate with their troops, but this ability to
command at a distance came at a cost: transmissions could be easily
intercepted. Encrypted versions of a general's orders, troops' positions,
and location and speed of ships at sea were available for friend and foe
alike, and cryptanalysis became a critical wartime tool. However, errors
made by cipher clerks were cryptography's greatest weakness. A single
error, by substantially simplying the breaking of a cryptosystem, could
endanger all communications encrypted under that system. This led to
the development of automatic cryptography, a part of the mechanized
warfare that characterized World War I.

American Gilbert Vernam developed encryption done directly on the

telegraph wire, eliminating error-prone cipher clerks. This was done using
"one-time" pads, a string of bits that is added, bit by bit, to the numeric
version of the message, giving a completely secure cryptosystem. One-
time pads can be used only once; if a key is ever reused, the system
becomes highly vulnerable. The constant need for fresh keys, therefore,
eliminates much of the advantage of one-time pads.

After the war inventors designed automated polyalphabetic substitution

systems. Instead of looking up the substitutions in a paper table, they
could be found by electric currents passing through wires. Rotor
machines, in which the plaintext and ciphertext alphabets are on opposite
sides of an insulated disk and wires connect each letter on one side to a
letter on the other, were simultaneously developed in Europe and
the United States. A single rotor is a simple substitution cipher.
Automation can provide more. After encrypting a single letter, the rotor
can shift, so that the letters of the plaintext alphabet are connected to
new letters of the ciphertext alphabet. More rotors can be added and
these can shift at different intervals. Such a system provides far more
complex encryption than simple polyalphabetic substitution. These were
also the principles behind the most famous rotor machine, the Enigma,
used by the Germans during World War II. The Allies' ability to decode the
Japanese cryptosystem Purple and the German Enigma dispatches during
World War II played crucial roles in the battles of the Pacific and control
of the Atlantic. The Colossus, a precursor of the first electronic, general-
purpose computer, was built by the British during the war to decode
German communications.

While substitution and transposition used by themselves result in weak

cryptosystems, combining them properly with the key can result in a
strong system. These were the operations used in the design of the U.S.
Data Encryption Standard (DES), an algorithm with a 56-bit key that
became a U.S. cryptography standard in 1977. With the exception of web-
browser encryption and relatively insecure cable-TV signal encryption,
DES was the most widely used cryptosystem in the world in the late
1990s. It was used for electronic funds transfer, for the protection of
civilian satellite communications, and—with a small variation—for
protecting passwords on computer systems.

For a cryptosystem to be secure, the difficulty of breaking it should be

roughly the time it takes to do an exhaustive search of the keys. In the
case of DES, this would be the time it takes to perform 256 DES
encryptions. By 1998, however, the speed of computing had caught up
with DES, and a $250,000 computer built by the Electronic Frontier
Foundation decrypted a DES-encoded message in 56 hours. In 2001 the
National Institute of Standards and Technology, whose predecessor (the
National Bureau of Standards) certified DES, chose a successor: the
Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm Rijndael (pronounced "Rhine
Dahl"). This algorithm, which works in three key lengths (128, 192, and
256 bits), was developed by two Belgian researchers. Used even at its
shortest key length, a message encrypted by Rijndael is expected to
remain secure for many billions of years.

DES and Rijndael are "symmetric," or "private-key," systems; the same

key is used for encryption and decryption and is known to both sender
and receiver. But electronic commerce requires a different solution. What
happens when a shopper tries to buy an item from an Internet merchant?
The parties may not share a private key. How can the customer securely
transmit credit information? The answer is public-key cryptography.

Public-Key Cryptography
Public-key cryptography operates on the seemingly paradoxical idea that
one can publish the encryption algorithm and the key, and yet decryption
remains computationally unfeasible for anyone but the correct recipient
of the message. The concept, invented by Whitfield Diffie and Martin
Hellman in 1975, relies on the existence of mathematical functions that
are fast to compute but which take an extremely long time to invert.
Multiplication and factoring are one such pair. Using processors available
in 2001, the product of two 200-digit primes can be determined in under
a second. Even with the world's fastest computers in 2002, factoring a
400-digit integer is estimated to take trillions of years. The well-known
public-key algorithm RSA, named after its inventors Ronald Rivest, Adi
Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, relies on the difficulty of factoring for its
security.

Public-key cryptography is sometimes called "two-key" cryptography,

since the public encryption key is different from the decryption key. By
enabling two parties communicating over an insecure network to
establish a private piece of information, public-key cryptography
simplifies the problem of key distribution. Public-key systems run much
slower than private-key ones, and so they are primarily used to establish
an encryption key. This key is then used by a private-key system to
encode the communication. Public-key cryptography also enables digital
signatures , which verify the identity of the sender of an electronic
document.

Although cryptography has been studied and used for thousands of years
by mathematicians, politicians, linguists, and lovers, it became the
province of national security in the half century following World War I.
And while humans have always sought to keep information from prying
eyes, the Information Age has intensified that need. Despite controversy,
cryptography has returned from being a tool used solely by governments
to one that is used by ordinary people, everyday.

See also Internet: Applications; Security; World Wide Web.

Susan Landau

Bibliography

Buchmann, Johannes. Introduction to Cryptography. New York: Springer

Verlag, 2000.

Dam, Kenneth, and Herbert Lin. Cryptography's Role in Securing the

Information Society. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1996.

Diffie, Whitfield, and Susan Landau. Privacy on the Line: The Politics of
Wiretapping and Encryption.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.

Kahn, David. The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing. New York:
Macmillan Company, 1967.

Schneier, Bruce. Applied Cryptography. New York: John Wiley and Sons,
1996.
Sinkov, Abraham. Elementary Cryptanalysis: A Mathematical
Approach. Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of America, New
Mathematical Library, 1966.