Section 1.

Development of Cryptography

Task: Research on the development of cryptography and fill up the table below
with the major events that occurred during each period of time.
Read up on the ciphers you come across in your research and other
classical ciphers.
1900 BC

600 BC

500 BC

50 BC

800

It started in the Egypt town called Menet Khufu near the river Nil.
Khnumhotep II was an architect of Pharao Amenemhet II. He built
some monuments for the Pharao which had to be documented.
Khnumhotep II had the idea to exchange some words and text parts
within the document (substitution). In case the document would been
stolen, the thief would not find the correct way to the gold treasure.
Hebrew scribes writing down the book of Jeremiah used a reversedalphabet simple substitution cipher known as ATBASH. (Jeremiah
started dictating to Baruch in 605 BC but the chapters containing
these bits of cipher are attributed to a source labeled ``C'' (believed
not to be Baruch) which could be an editor writing after the
Babylonian exile in 587 BC, someone contemporaneous with Baruch
or even Jeremiah himself.) ATBASH was one of a few Hebrew ciphers
of the time (SANS).
Thucydides tells of orders delivered to the Spartan prince and
general Pasanius in 475 BCE via what could be the earliest system of
military cryptography, the skytale. As a device for conveying ciphers,
the skytale consists of a staff of wood around which a strip of papyrus
is tightly wound. Writing the message down the length of the staff,
the parchment is unwound to conceal the message. Since the
message appears to be nothing more than a series of disconnected
letters, its true meaning remains concealed. However, it seems
unlikely that such a technique was ever used in this way. Ancient
texts by Aeneas the Tactician, Polybius, and others describe further
methods for concealing messages but none of these actually seem to
have been used either (Glikman). The secret key of the text is the
circumference of the wood. With the wrong circumference, the
message is unusable. If the wood matches, you are able to read the
message. Attacking the skytale was no big thing, this at least when
you understood the principle of the algorithm.
The Caesar Cipher was developed during the roman empire. The
code was based on the replacement of each plaintext character with
a new shifted character in the alphabet. The secret key of the shift
between the plaintext and the ciphertext. As example, if the shift is 5
and the plaintext is
SECRET FOR YOU
the ciphertext would look as in the example below.
XJHWJY KTW DTZ
This because you calculate plaintext + shift (Secret Key) = ciphertext
which is
S + Shift (5) = X.
Cryptanalysis and frequency analysis leading to techniques for
breaking monoalphabetic substitution ciphers are developed in A
Manuscript on Deciphering Cryptographic Messages by the Muslim

1500

1600
1800

1900

1920

mathematician, Al-Kindi (Alkindus), who may have been inspired by

textual analysis of the Qur'an. He also covers methods of
encipherments, cryptanalysis of certain encipherments, and
statistical analysis of letters and letter combinations in Arabic.
1518 - Johannes Trithemius' book on cryptology
1553 - Bellaso invents Vigenre cipher
1585 - Vigenre's book on ciphers
1586 - Cryptanalysis used by spy master Sir Francis Walsingham to
implicate Mary Queen of Scots in the Babington Plot to murder Queen
Elizabeth I of England. Queen Mary was eventually executed.
1641 - Wilkins' Mercury (English book on cryptology)

1809 - 14 George Scovell's work on Napoleonic ciphers during the

Peninsular War
1831 - Joseph Henry proposes and builds an electric telegraph
1835 - Samuel Morse develops the Morse code
1854 - Wheatstone invents Playfair cipher
1854 - Babbage's method for breaking polyalphabetic ciphers (pub
1863 by Kasiski)
1855 - For the English side in Crimean War, Charles Babbage broke
Vigenre's autokey cipher (the 'unbreakable cipher' of the time) as
well as the much weaker cipher that is called Vigenre cipher today.
Due to secrecy it was also discovered and attributed somewhat later
to the Prussian Friedrich Kasiski.
1883 - Auguste Kerckhoffs' La Cryptographie militare published,
containing his celebrated laws of cryptography
1885 - Beale ciphers published
1894 - The Dreyfus Affair in France involves the use of cryptography,
and its misuse, in regard to false documents.
1915 - William Friedman applies statistics to cryptanalysis
(coincidence counting, etc)
1917 - Zimmermann telegram intercepted and decrypted, advancing
U.S. entry into World War I.
1919 - Edward Hebern invents/patents first rotor machine design a
rotor machine is an electro-mechanical device used for encrypting
and decrypting secret messages. A rotor machine is an electromechanical device used for encrypting and decrypting secret
messages
1921 - Washington Naval Conference - U.S. negotiating team aided
by decryption of Japanese diplomatic telegrams. The message
revealed the lowest naval ratio that would be acceptable to Tokyo;
U.S. negotiators used this knowledge to push the Japanese to giving
in.
1924 - MI8 (Herbert Yardley, et al) provide breaks of assorted traffic
in support of US position at Washington Naval Conference; aiding
other cryptanalysts to break more codes.
1932 - first break of German Army Enigma by Marian Rejewski in
Poland, giving them a jumpstart British reading of the Enigma- a rotor
machine used to generate ciphers for the encryption and decryption
of secret messages.
1931 - The American Black Chamber (cryptography headquarters) by
Herbert O. Yardley is published, revealing much about American

1940

1968

1976

1991

2000

2010

cryptography, giving people an opportunity to learn more about it.

1940 - break of Japan's PURPLE machine cipher by SIS team.
However, U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor surprised by Japanese
attack, despite U.S. breaking of Japanese codes. U.S. enters World
War II
April 1943 - Admiral Yamamoto, architect of Pearl Harbor attack, is
assassinated by U.S. forces who know his itinerary from decoded
messages. This shows that the lives of cryptographers are fragile.
December 1943 - The Colossus computer was built, by Thomas
Flowers at The Post Office Research Laboratories in London, to crack
the German Lorenz cipher (SZ42). It was so advanced that the
computer had to be destroyed, lest it fell into the wrong hands.
1946 - VENONA's first break into Soviet espionage traffic from early
1940s
Navajo codetalkers were Navajo people who were employed to
transmit and deliver secret messages in the battlefield. It was
extremely useful as their language was completely differently
structured as compared to the commonly used ones. Up till today,
the Navajo language cannot be cracked without the knowledge of the
language itself.
1968 - John Anthony Walker walks into the Soviet Union's embassy in
Washington and
sells information on KL-7 cipher machine. The Walker spy ring
operates until 1985.
1974 - Horst Feistel develops Feistel network block cipher design.
1976 - the Data Encryption Standard was published as an official
Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) for the United States.
The Data Encryption Standard was published as an official Federal
Information Processing Standard (FIPS) for the United States. The
Data Encryption Standard (DES) is a cipher (a method for encrypting
information) selected as an official Federal Information Processing
Standard (FIPS) for the United States in 1976 and which has
subsequently enjoyed widespread use internationally. The algorithm
was initially controversial with classified design elements, a relatively
short key length, and suspicions about a National Security Agency
(NSA) backdoor. DES consequently came under intense academic
scrutiny which motivated the modern understanding of block ciphers
and their cryptanalysis.
Diffie and Hellman publish New Directions in Cryptography.
Phil Zimmermann releases the public key encryption program PGP
along with its source code, which quickly appears on the Internet.
Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is a computer program that provides
cryptographic privacy and authentication. PGP is often used for
signing, encrypting and decrypting e-mails to increase the security of
e-mail communications.
RSA Security Inc. released their RSA algorithm into the public
domain, a few days in advance of their U.S. Patent 4,405,829
expiring. Following the relaxation of the U.S. government export
restrictions, this removed one of the last barriers to the world-wide
distribution of much software based on cryptographic systems
Quantum cryptography, or quantum key distribution (QKD), uses
quantum mechanics to guarantee secure communication. It enables
two parties to produce a shared random bit string known only to
them, which can be used as a key to encrypt and decrypt messages.

An important and unique property of quantum cryptography is the

ability of the two communicating users to detect the presence of any
third party trying to gain knowledge of the key. This results from a
fundamental part of quantum mechanics: the process of measuring a
quantum system in general disturbs the system. A third party trying
to eavesdrop on the key must in some way measure it, thus
introducing detectable anomalies. By using quantum superpositions
or quantum entanglement and transmitting information in quantum
states, a communication system can be implemented which detects
eavesdropping. If the level of eavesdropping is below a certain
threshold a key can be produced which is guaranteed as secure (i.e.
the eavesdropper has no information about), otherwise no secure key
is possible and communication is aborted. The security of quantum
cryptography relies on the foundations of quantum mechanics, in
contrast to traditional public key cryptography which relies on the
computational difficulty of certain mathematical functions, and
cannot provide any indication of eavesdropping or guarantee of key
security.