Codes and Codecracking Intrude Increasingly In Our Daily Lives

Codes and Codecracking Intrude Increasingly In Our Daily Lives

Sadly for those of us who enjoy tales of codes and ciphers, future books about this subject are likely to have only an historical focus. That is so because the evolution of cryptology is taking it into realms of mathematics and quantum physics that are inaccessible to almost all of us. And, more likely than not, those Ph.D.s engaged in this new work are in thrall to government agencies unlikely to permit disclosure. That's too bad, because the chances of mischief in government are usually reduced if there is some public participation and oversight.

"In the modern age," Stephen Pincock writes in Codebreaker, "the field of cryptology is largely in the hands of physicists and mathematicians [and] most of what is going on is undoubtedly happening behind closed doors. Government agencies, such as America's National Security Agency (NSA), and Britain's General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), keep information about codebreaking and cryptography under tight wraps, making prediction of future developments a fool's game."

Even historical texts about ciphers and codes can take us down alleys that require intellectual perseverance to read and to understand. Indeed, writing and reading anything at all is an abstraction, an abstraction that we take for granted by the time we leave primary school. Writing in English, as I am doing here, makes it possible for anyone who happens upon my text to read these printed black squiggles and grasp a meaning that is not inherently in the ink or on the page (or screen!). It has an aspect that is almost metaphysical. Yet understanding occurs, whether I am a thousand miles away, or alive or dead, or, indeed, dead for a thousand years.

And with modest effort, my words can translated into Finnish, Swahili, or Tagalog.

Translation into a foreign language is a simple analog to codes and ciphers, a wonderfully intuitive way to grasp the process. Yet the art of cipher and code creation takes this process of abstraction to a higher level and in a different direction. Through the use of codes and ciphers, we conceal rather than reveal the meaning of the dialogues and texts that we express, using those very same squiggles we learned in primary school, and we do so in such a way that only someone with a 'key' can reveal the hidden meaning and read the text.

That is the essence of the process in both codes and ciphers, though they differ in a technical sense. "Ciphers are systems for disguising the meaning of a message by replacing each of the individual letters of a message with other symbols," Pincock explains, whereas "codes, on the other hand, place more emphasis on meanings than characters, and tend to replace whole words or phrases according to a list contained in a code-book." But this is a detail that need not concern us.

Codes and ciphers are explicitly and inherently not easy to understand for at their heart is the desire not to be understood. And does that not also lend to their enjoyment?

Codebreaker, The History of Codes and Ciphers, From The Ancient Pharaohs To Quantum Cryptography, (New York: 2006), Walker & Company, is Stephen Pincock's slick, short, coffee table account of the subject. This book would grace any living room or library. It is printed on heavyweight coated stock and it is full of high-resolution photographs. It is not a textbook. Quite the opposite: It is a book for the amateur. It touches gracefully and lightly upon its many facets without delving too deeply into any of its tantalizing nooks and crannies. For the young at heart, it also offers examples of several codes and ciphers that one can try one's hand at to see if there is a real cryptanalyst within. Don't plan to use this book as a guide to passing the CISSP Certified Information Systems Security Professional exam however. Pincock's training is in biology and chemistry, not codebreaking. Yet this is an engrossing book that will provide hours of entertainment for those who are already aficionados.

Stephen Pincock, a 1991 graduate of the University of New South Wales, is a biochemist by training. Since 2008 he has been deputy editor of Australian Doctor. He is a former editor of The Scientist magazine and writes occasionally for Nature, the weekly journal of science. He's written a number of books on science subjects. He divides his time between Sydney and London.

The two areas of this book I most enjoyed were the discussion of the German Enigma ciphering machine in World War II, and how a group of Polish mathematicians broke it, with later help from Alan Turing and a platoon of British cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park in England; and secondly, I learned a great deal from Pincock's lay exposition of the complex mathematics used to factor large primes, and how a breakthrough in that area by any brilliant teenager could put at risk current methods of encryption.

Arthur Scherbius, an electrical engineer native to Frankfurt, invented the Enigma ciphering machine for commercial use in the early 1920s. Thinking to protect his British commercial rights, he filed his patents in London as well as in Vienna and Berlin, an unintended favor to Churchill's war cabinet happily exploited twenty years later.

The Nazis improved greatly upon Scherbius' early design, which simply used three wheels with the alphabet inscribed on them to scramble input into output. In went readable text, out came scrambled gobbledygook which could then be safely transmitted by wireless without fear of it being understood without an Enigma machine with its wheels precisely turned in identical positions to the input device. It was actually a bit more complicated than that, involving a few extra layers of scrambling, but in its essence that is all that Enigma did.

The Enigma device itself was housed in a varnished wooden box and looked very much like a terrifically ugly typewriter, and was about the same size, easily portable, though it required an electrical power supply.

Like any mechanical device, Enigma was prone to breakdowns, and it was these breakdowns, coupled with sloppiness on the part of its human users, that made it possible for the Poles and the Brits to break Enigma and read the German High Command's most secret communications. Those patent plans in London didn't hurt either.

Pincock tells this story very well, with great excitement and a page-turning intensity. Historians still debate the real influence breaking Enigma had on the course of the war, but we should not forget Winston Churchill's words to King George VI after his victory: "It was thanks to Ultra [the British code term for the intelligence gleaned from breaking the Enigma cipher] that we won the war."

That's a definitive answer, at least for this reader.

A more modern problem has to do with the way we use computers and the Internet to safely transmit private information like credit card numbers and health care data. Cryptology is no longer just a military concern. Today, encryption is routinely employed every time you use your Blackberry or order flowers online. And so it has to be done with great speed and without much human intervention, and it also has to be far, far more secure than Enigma ever was.

Modern encryption techniques rely on a quirk of some real numbers, that large category can be divided only by themselves and 1. You learned about them in high school: We call these numbers 'primes' or 'prime numbers.'

Here are a few of them, the first five, in fact: 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11.

The list goes on to infinity. There are much larger primes, including, for example, this one: 7,427,466,391. The two very largest primes yet discovered (in 2013) have more than seven million digits each. The largest prime has not been found -- for the compelling reason that there is no largest prime. There will always be a larger prime than the largest prime yet found. So, who cares?

Well, it so happens one can do interesting things with prime numbers that lend themselves to secret communication. One can multiply them togther. For example, (5 times 7) generates a product, in this case 35, which cryptographers call a 'modulus.' The wonderful thing about multiplying two primes to create a modulus is that it can be done very quickly, almost instantaneously on a computer. Yet the reverse is not true.

If I give you the modulus 35 and ask you to tell me what two primes are multiplied to create it, it will take you a few seconds or minutes to figure that out by trial and error.

Now, let me give you this modulus: 440,191,461,900,225,377,727. And I ask you to tell me the two primes that make it up? That is a tougher problem (clue, one of the two primes is that great big one I gave you earlier).

Super-computers may take five months of continuous operation to factor a large modulus into its two primes. Still larger numbers are thought to take thirty years of continuous computer calculation to factor. Some may not even be crackable in the lifetime of our galaxy.

So, if I want to create an unbreakable code, I can safely transmit the modulus to my receiver at the other as open text, in 'the clear' to use the term of art. I don't care if the whole world knows the modulus, including thieves and spies, because as long as the two primes that make it up remain hidden, my code is secure. Unless my opponent has a few thousand years of spare computer time at his disposal, he won't crack my code.

And yet, and yet!

Consider this from Stephen Pincock: "As a result... of the increasingly complex mathematical methods needed to find solutions, modern-day codebreaking is now mostly beyond the realm of the interested amateur and is instead the preserve of mathematicians. But the tantalizing possibility remains that there might be a chink in the armor of encryption that uses the difficulty of factorizing large numbers.

"Although the factorization methods that have been discovered so far are mathematically complex, a simpler way may still exist. After all, the mathematics involved in Einstein's theory of relativity is horribly complex, yet out of the complexity came the beautifully simple equation E=mc2. Thus codebreakers around the world are focussing their efforts on finding simple factorization methods. If they do find them... " then breaking the current codes used by credit cards and governments may fall apart very quickly indeed!

And this is where the bright high school student comes in. Mathematics is first and foremost the arena of the young and gifted.

So watch out and stay tuned. We may yet need newer and better ways to protect our money and our secrets.

Frank Kryza is the author of The Race For Timbuktu, published by Harper Collins in 2006:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Race-Timbuktu-Search-Africas/dp/B0046LUCHK#!

Frank also wrote The Power Of Light, published by McGraw Hill in 2003:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Light-Story-Harness/dp/0071400214#!

You can reach Frank Kryza by email at: FTKryza@yahoo.com

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_(By Frank T Kryza).