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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.” 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. O

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Crypto by Steven Levy, does a good job of showing that this technology took a great number of people to bring it to where it is today. Everyone has their own “public” key, which can be published. The NSA gave him a secrecy order for a device called a Phasorphone, which could scramble a voice. He is a graduate of MIT that apparently had an interest in cryptography since childhood. The NSA, however, had to put its two cents in also. Three of them were Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman. When the Diffie and Hellman came up with the scheme, they did not have a working system. Instead, it needs to know what everyone is doing and when they are doing it. ” The NSA declared his invention classified material even though he did not have access to anything classified while inventing it. Originally, DES used a 128-bit key, but changed it to a 56-bit key. After publishing a paper on their findings, many more scientists began work on this problem. Diffie and Hellman eventually go on to invent the public key encryption system, the foundation for RSA encryption. ne-way functions are easy to solve going one-way, but take much more computational time to solve the other way. As time goes on, Diffie becomes more and more interested in the subject of cryptography, only to find that much of the important information concerning the subject is controlled by the NSA. com, priceline, or any other online distributor, we have to use encryption.
Approximate Word count = 1131
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

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