Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the government

A detailed Summary of Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the government

The full title explains it all for this book by Steven Levy: Crypto: How the code rebels beat the government - saving privacy in the digital age. Crypto is the story of the people who invented the public key encryption scheme that is in use today. This technology is considered as "one of the most important technological breakthroughs in the last one thousand years.aE? There is no physical safe man can make that is totally secure against an intruder. Even the strongest safe can be broken into with sophisticated tools. However, armed with the power of mathematics, cryptography has come very close.

A problem arises when trying to communicate securely with a stranger on an insecure channel. If I want to encrypt this message, and I have never been in contact with the receiver, how does that person know how to decrypt the message that I will send? If I send the key across the channel, it may be intercepted by an eavesdropper.

This is where public key encryption comes in. Most ciphers we have known in the past are symmetrical. They are as easy to decrypt, as they are to encrypt. Public key encryption uses mathematical one-way functions to encrypt its message. One-w

Time and time again, the NSA interfered or restricted the ideas of some of America's resourceful inventors. For example, in 1977, and engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin named George Divida applied for a patent that used mathematical techniques to produce a stream cipher. The government responded by giving him a "secrecy order.aE? The NSA declared his invention classified material even though he did not have access to anything classified while inventing it. Another example is Carl Nicolai. The NSA gave him a secrecy order for a device called a Phasorphone, which could scramble a voice. The government also restricted information and papers written by various academics on the subject of cryptography.

Diffie finds the NSA's control on this type of scientific material very frustrating to say the least. In his search for information about cryptography, Diffie meets Marty Hellman. Diffie and Hellman eventually go on to invent the public key encryption system, the foundation for RSA encryption.

The National Security Agency was born on November 4, 1952 under president Harry Truman. The agency is broken up into two divisions: COMSEC and COMINT. The COMSEC division tries to devise codes that cannot be broken, while the COMINT division collects and decodes information from around the world ( including the United States ).

In our society, we have laws that govern how we act, but what gives the government the right to determine what we can think? Big Brother was trying to prevent us from getting information - scientific information at that. Science is not the property of any one government. It belongs to the world. The government should

Some common words found in the essay are:
Key Encryption, Diffie Hellman, Nicolai NSA, Levy Crypto, Originally DES, Eventually Lotus, George Divida, Steven Levy, Whitfield Diffie, COMINT COMSEC, public key, key encryption, public key encryption, encryption system, diffie hellman, encrypt message, steven levy, crypto steven levy, 128-bit key, one-way functions, crypto steven, subject cryptography, key encryption system,

Approximate Word count = 1131
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Technology