A Brief History of

Cryptography
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Florian Deckert
23.03.2007

Encyclopedia Britannica:
Cryptography: Practice of the enciphering and
deciphering of messages in secret code in order
to render them unintelligible to all but the intended
receiver.

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Florian Deckert

Early Cryptography
3500 BC: Sumerians
Cuneiform writings

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Florian Deckert

Early Cryptography
1900 BC: Egypt
First known use of cryptography

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Florian Deckert

Early Cryptography
500 600 BC:
ATBASH Cipher
Used by Hebrew
scribes
Substitution cipher
(reversed alphabet)

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Florian Deckert

Early Cryptography
486 BC: Greece
skytale

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Florian Deckert

Early Cryptography
60 50 BC: Julius Caesar
substitution cipher
Shift letters by X positions:
E.g. X = 3: A D, B E,
C F, ...

Weakness?
Frequency analysis (1000 AD)

1466: Leon Albertini: cipher

disk
Used until 16th century

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Florian Deckert

Medieval Cryptography
1587: Vigenre Cipher
Polyalphabetic: one to
many relationship
Example
Encrypt: lamp
Keyword: ubc
Ciphertext: fboj

Apart from that...

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Florian Deckert

Modern Cryptography
1845: Morse Code
Represention by code
signal
States (on and off)
composed into 5
symbols

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Florian Deckert

Modern Cryptography
1863: Kasiski breaks Vigenere:
Find length of keyword
Divide message into substitution cryptograms
Use frequency analysis to solve these

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Modern Cryptography
1918: ADFGVX Cipher
Used in the German army in WWI

A
D
F
G
X
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A
B
D
Q
G
M

D
T
H
F
J
R

F
A
O
V
C
E

Florian Deckert

G
L
Z
S
U
W

X
P
K
N
X
Y
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Modern Cryptography
1918: The Enigma
Arthur Scherbius
Business: confidential
docs
No codebooks
Rotors multi
substitution
Wireing changes as-youtype
German forces in WWII
Room 40
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Modern Cryptography
1937 1945: Navajo Code Talkers

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Modern Cryptography
1949: Shannon:
Communication
Theory of Secret
Systems
Proved: One time pad
unbreakable

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Modern Cryptography
Until mid 70s

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Modern Cryptography
1976: Diffie Hellman Key Exchange
Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman
Discrete logarithm problem:
G: finite cyclic group with n elements
Modulo n multiplication
b: generator of G: every element g of G can be
written as g = bk for some integer k
Goal: find k given g and b and n!

Very hard problem

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Modern Cryptography
So how does it work?
Exploits?
Man in the middle
Fix: additional authentication

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Modern Cryptography
Public Key Crypto
Key exchange problem
Asymmetric key algorithm
E.g: RSA, MIT, 1977

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Modern Cryptography
1991: PGP Pretty Good Privacy
Protocol, uses RSA
Encryption & decryption
Digital signatures
How does that work?

Web of Trust
Third party signs (public) key to attest association
between person and key

Other Possibility: Hierarchical, CA based

E.g.: X.509 Certificates in SSL
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Thank You!
Lets go to Koerners.