o g r a p h y

C r y p t
Presented by
Bolor | Arcon | Bawalan | Merin | Mazumdar
History of
Cryptography
BEGINNINGS Cuneiforms Writing
As far back as 2,000BC the Egyptians were using complex and cryptic systems of hieroglyphics to decorate tombs, not so
much in order to conceal the meaning as to make their dead nobles more enigmatic
The Mesopotamians encrypted cuneiform text to hide information, while the Hebrews of the 5th century BC used simple
ciphers, substituting the last letter of the alphabet for the first, the penultimate for the second, and all the way down the Scytale
line.
The Spartans of the same era came up with an ingenuous system, writing messages on thin sheets of papyrus, wrapped
around a baton or “scytale”. The sheet would be unwrapped, encrypting the message, and it could only be decrypted when
wrapped once more around a scytale of the same diameter. This enabled the Spartans to send and receive secret military
plans in confidence.
In the second century BC, the Greek scholar Polybius laid out the alphabet in a grid of five by five squares, then
prescribed using torches or hand signals to relay encrypted messages, coordinate by coordinate.
Caesar Cipher
Julius Caesar had his own cipher, shifting each letter in a message two places further down the alphabet.

The great pioneer of cryptoanalaysis – the study and breaking of encryption – was the Arab polymath al-Kindi, who in
the 9th century AD applied scientific methods, using the frequency with which letters are used in a language as a means of
breaking down the cipher al-Kindi
CRYPTOGRAPHY IN THE MACHINE AGE
With the end of the First World War, however, cryptography entered the machine age.
In 1915, two Dutch naval officers created a mechanised rotor-based system, and by 1919 similar systems had been
demonstrated in the US by Huge Hebern, in Holland by Hugo Koch and in Germany by Arthur Scherbius. Scherbius’s
machine, demonstrated in Bern in 1923, was adopted by the German Navy in 1926 and by the German Army in 1928. Enigma.
Scherbius called it Enigma.
During the Second World War, however, it became absolutely critical. Isolated from Nazi-occupied Europe, Britain was
dependent on Atlantic convoys under constant threat from German U-Boats. The U-Boats worked individually but, on
finding a convoy, made contact with other U-Boats, using radio to set-up highly coordinated attacks. These messages
were enciphered by the German Navy’s Enigma machines, so breaking Enigma became a matter of survival.
At Bletchley Park in England, Alan Turing and Gordon Weichman did substantial work on the Polish Bomba and created a
new version: a code breaking machine that could work out the set of rotors in use for a day and their positions from a crib - Collosus
a section of plain text believed to correspond to the intercepted ciphertext. Meanwhile, Turing, Max Newman and Tommy
Flowers created Colossus – the world’s first programmable electronic digital computer –

CRYPTOGRAPHY MEETS THE COMPUTER AGE

The arrival of the computer and the use of computers to store sensitive information created new challenges for cryptography.
Computing enabled organisations to store, secure and analyse data more efficiently, but it also empowered new approaches to breaking
Asymmetric key
code.
In 1949, Claude Shannon’s paper, Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems, established a basic theory for maths-based cryptography
in a computer age.
n 1976, Whitfield Diffie and Marti Hellman introduced the concepts of asymmetric key encryption and the public key. This idea was
revolutionary: a system that used not one key to encrypt and decrypt, but two pairs of mathematically-related keys, each of which could
decrypt messages encrypted by the other.
Governments demanded new levels of security. In 1979, IBM, with input from the NSA, developed the Data Encryption Standard (DES)
– a cutting-edge 56-bit encryption standard that was so advanced that even supercomputers couldn’t crack it.
 Concerns in
Cryptography
KEY TRUST
USABILITY
We can have the best MANAGEMENT We can have the best crypto in
cryptography in the universe but if Many crypto-systems lump many the universe, but if the entity you
it is difficult for humans to use, security assumptions onto key are communicating with is
then it is next to useless. At the management i.e. "if you keep your untrustworthy or even just
moment software like TextSecure keys safe everything should be incompetent, we are at risk.
are making the instant messaging fine" - this is related to the
usecase simpler. End to end password management issue - how
encrypted email still has a long do  we make it easy for a user to
way to go though. access their crypto keys (and easy
to rotate/replace their crypto keys)
but make it very difficult for an
attacker to do so.
Uses of Cryptography
SECRECY IN SECRECY IN INTEGRITY IN
TRANSMISSION STORAGE TRANSMISSION

INTEGRITY IN AUTHENTICATION CREDENTIALING

STORAGE OF IDENTITY SYSTEMS