History of Cryptography

Cryptography and decryption have a long history, but recent historical studies show that Islamic civilization has been the root of the development of organized decryption methods. At the beginning of the Abbasid era, many scientific fields were developed among the Muslims that were effective in developing decoding techniques. The most important fields were arithmetic, algebra, statistics, and linguistics. The advancement of Islamic civilization, such as the creation of a great religious system, the translation of scientific works of other civilizations into the Arabic language, getting the technology of paper production from China, and so on, have accelerated this movement.
By reading al-Kindi's treatise and other books written by Muslims on the subject of cryptography and decryption, we find that Muslims were a few centuries ahead of Europeans in this field. The first methodical European decoding measures date back to the Pascal (1662-1623) and Pierre de Fermat (1665- 1607).

This is a comined book review of

Katherine Ellison, Susan Kim (eds.), A Material History of Medieval and Early Modern Ciphers. Cryptography and the History of Literacy, Routledge: Oxford 2018.
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Katherine Ellison, A Cultural History of Early Modern English Cryptography Manuals, Routledge: Oxford 2017.

As customary for JIPSS journal book reviews, the style is a digest-like review which focuses primarly on aspects relevant to the audience of JIPSS (Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies).

Cryptography and magic are often associated. Ciphers—as means of secrecy —seem to find their natural place in magic texts. In traditional historiogra-phy, magic and alchemy were often represented as secretive, whereas modern science was portrayed to be open. According to this view, openness is a positive value that supports academic research. In contrast, secrecy, which is held rather to be historically characteristic of technology, magic, and alchemy, has been abandoned by modern science. This old understanding has obviously been challenged, as many scholars have shown how secrecy in science became not only a tool of protecting knowledge from intellectual competitors , but also a dynamic social practice, a force that creates and organizes groups, and influences the mechanisms of exclusion-inclusion. The contents of secrets are often not relevant for the study of the dynamics of secrecy; the ability to withhold or share information in itself becomes a power enabling social control, regardless of the object of secrecy. The role of secretive practices is not much simpler in the case of magical manuscripts, either. The focus of this article is on how one major means of secrecy, cryptography, was used in magical texts and handbooks. It argues that late medieval and early modern magic texts frequently included ciphers; however, these do not seem to be tools for hiding the message. Their encryption made no content inaccessible. The function of ciphers was, rather, to invite engagement with the text, which can be described as a special maneuver in the rhetoric of secrecy. SECRETS AND SECRECY The issue of secrecy has become a crucial research topic in recent decades in various fields of intellectual history as well as the historiography of science.

The point of departure of this study is a seemingly trivial question: how did “code” come to designate a key concept of linguistics and semiotics? It is generally held that the term migrated from information theory to linguistics in the early 1950s, and accordingly it followed its own path in the study of language and other semiotic systems. In that way, a new semiotic concept emerged.
This deceptively straightforward answer gives rise to some crucial questions. First, how did the migration of a technical term give rise to a linguistic concept? Was the new term adopted simply as a fashionable alternative label for a well-established concept (e.g. Saussure’s langue)? If not, how can we account for a concept formation solely in terms of terminological shifts? Moreover, how did a semiotic concept emerge out of a linguistic concept of code?
The present study will seek to address for the first time these questions in an attempt to shed new light to the emergence and early development of the semiotic concept of code, focusing on the work of the key figures (Eco, Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss) in this neglected episode of the history of concepts in the humanities and social sciences.

Today we regard cryptology, the mathematical and technical science of ciphers and codes, and philology, the humanistic study of natural or human languages and documents, as separate domains of activity. But the contiguity, even intimacy of these two domains is a historical fact with an institutional history. From the earliest documented techniques for the statistical analysis of text and experiments with mechanized literary analysis, to electromechanical and electronic code-breaking and machine translation, early literary data processing, and the computational philology of late twentieth-century humanities computing and early twenty-first-century “digital humanities,” what I call cryptophilology has flourished alongside imperial jingoism and war — and occasionally served them. In this book I argue that while computing’s humanistic applications are as every bit as historically important as its mathematical and technical origins, they are no less marked and no less constrained by the priorities of national security agencies and institutions devoted to both offensive signals intelligence and mass surveillance — and that our hope for human progress must be tempered by that, so far as even (or especially) in modern democracies, the proliferation of security institutions and the scale of their operations can be justified only by and through programmatically sustained insecurity.

A large number of enciphered documents survived from early modern Hungary. This area was a particularly fertile territory where cryptographic methods proliferated, because a large portion of the population was living in the frontier zone, and participated (or was forced to participate) in the network of the information flow. A quantitative analysis of sixteenth-century to seventeenth-century Hungarian ciphers (300 cipher keys and 1,600 partly or entirely enciphered letters) reveals that besides the dominance of diplomatic use of cryptography, there were many examples of ŸprivateŒ applications too. This book reconstructs the main reasons and goals why historical actors chose to use ciphers in a diplomatic letter, a military order, a diary or a private letter, what they decided to encrypt, and how they perceived the dangers threatening their messages.

This paper is the first scholarly attempt to examine the history of Chinese cryptography and the role it played in building the intelligence network of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) from 1927 to 1949. Rather than investigating the institutional structure of intelligence, I focus on Chinese characters, the primary medium that made cryptology and intelligence possible. Given that the Chinese writing system is by nature nonalphabetic and thus noncipherable, how did cryptography work in Chinese? How did the state and its scientists reengineer Chinese characters for the purposes of secret communication? This paper argues that due to the Chinese writing system itself, Chinese cryptography was bound to the use of codebooks rather than ciphers; thus, “codebook management” was central to building intelligence networks in China.

Apokrif evangélium vagy egyszerű imakönyv? Hamisítvány vagy hiteles történeti emlék? Elfeledett írás vagy szuperbiztos kód, esetleg mesterséges nyelv? Magyar, román, szanszkrit, latin, netalán török? A Rohonci kódex hírnevét különös kettősség jellemzi: helyet kapott a világtörténelem megfejtetlen írásainak illusztris társaságában, miközben a legutóbbi időkig komoly kísérlet nem történt rejtélyes jeleinek elolvasására. Láng Benedek könyve egy izgalmas nyomozás története, amelyet a szerző e Budapesten őrzött, titokzatos és gazdagon illusztrált kódex megfejtése érdekében folytatott. A fiatal tudománytörténész minden részletre kiterjedő, alapos vizsgálata során az olvasó beavatást nyerhet a máig megfejtetlen, rejtélyes könyvek világába, a titkosírások és a kódok történetébe, valamint a rejtjelfejtés hagyományos és modern módszereibe is.

First discovered in a Hungarian library in 1838, the Rohonc Codex keeps privileged company with some of the most famous unsolved writing systems in the world, notably the Voynich manuscript, the Phaistos Disk, and Linear A. Written entirely in cipher, this 400-year-old, 450-page-long, richly illustrated manuscript initially gained considerable attention but was later dismissed as an apparent forgery. No serious scholar would study it again until the turn of the twenty-first century. This engaging narrative follows historian Benedek Láng’s search to uncover the truth about this thoroughly mysterious book that has puzzled dozens of codebreakers.
Láng surveys the fascinating theories associated with the Codex and discusses possible interpretations of the manuscript as a biblical commentary, an apocryphal gospel, or a secret book written for and by a sect. He provides an overview of the secret writing systems known in early modern times and an account of the numerous efforts to create an artificial language or to find a long-lost perfect tongue—endeavors that were especially popular at the time the Codex was made. Lastly, he tests several codebreaking methods in order to decipher the Codex, finally pointing to a possible solution to the enigma of its content and language system.

Engagingly written, academically grounded, and thoroughly compelling, The Rohonc Code will appeal to historians, scholars, and lay readers interested in mysteries, codes, and ciphers.

A brief look into the history around the treatment of encryption as a munition, regulated by governments like guns and missiles etc. Diffie and Hellman are discussed, as some thoughts on when information becomes a weapon, when math is a weapon, when a thought is a weapon etc.

Hermann Pokorny was born in Kremisier (Moravia) on 7 April 1882. Pokorny in Great War managed to decipher almost all the Russian code keys and was employed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs until his final retirement in 1949. When he retired he was promoted to colonel general and awarded the Hungarian Order of Merit. Between 1950 and 1955 even he could not avoid political harassment, his pension was withdrawn. He died at the age of 78 in Budapest, in 1960 .

Today, most of us write in manners that we cannot peruse or ever would like to fathom; of course, composting is transposed into indescribable, encoded passages of "secure" data. However, on this research paper, I would like to touch upon the history of machine translation, indicating how its sources are to be found in the development of cryptanalysis or code cracking. Everything is starting with the letter of theologian, philosopher, and mathematician Marin Mersenne and René Descartes about creating an artificial universal language for making translation among the languages. Then these histories discover their epitome in Warren Weaver's persuasive memorandum. In this memorandum, Weaver built up a "cryptographic and translation" thought, drawing on his insight into the Second World War code cracking to dispatch the cutting edge field of machine translation. Anxious to discover new uses for the decryption strategies created amid WWII to decipher the Enigma code and Weaver suggested that cryptographic procedures be connected to the errand of translation.

Today we regard cryptology, the mathematical and technical science of ciphers and codes, and philology, the humanistic study of natural or human languages and documents, as separate domains of activity. But the contiguity, even intimacy of these two domains is a historical fact with an institutional history. From the earliest documented techniques for the statistical analysis of text and experiments with mechanized literary analysis, to electromechanical and electronic code-breaking and machine translation, early literary data processing, and the computational philology of late twentieth-century humanities computing and early twenty-first-century “digital humanities,” what I call cryptophilology has flourished alongside imperial jingoism and war — and occasionally served them. In this book I argue that while computing’s humanistic applications are as every bit as historically important as its mathematical and technical origins, they are no less marked and no less constrained by the priorities of national security agencies and institutions devoted to both offensive signals intelligence and mass surveillance — and that our hope for human progress must be tempered by that, so far as even (or especially) in modern democracies, the proliferation of security institutions and the scale of their operations can be justified only by and through programmatically sustained insecurity.

The current implementation of TLS involves your browser displaying a padlock, and a green bar, after successfully verifying the digital signature on the TLS certificate. Proposed is a solution where your browser's response to successful verification of a TLS certificate is to display a login window. That login window displays the identity credentials from the TLS certificate, to allow the user to authenticate Bob. It also displays a 'user-browser' shared secret i.e. a specific picture from your hard disk. This is not SiteKey, the image is shared between the computer user and their browser. It is never transmitted over the internet. Since sandboxed websites cannot access your hard disk this image cannot be counterfeited by phishing websites. Basically if you view the installed software component of your browser as an actor in the cryptography protocol, then the solution to phishing attacks is classic cryptography, as documented in any cryptography textbook.

"Figl wuchs in Wien und Sarajevo auf. Mit vierzehn Jahren begann seine Ausbildung als Kadett. 1891 kam er als Leutnant nach Dalmatien. Nach einem Dienstunfall wurde er 1910 als Hauptmann in den Ruhestand versetzt. 1911 wurde er jedoch reaktiviert, um die Chiffrierorganisation der k.u.k. Armee aufzubauen. Als Autodidakt vollbrachte er dabei überragende Leistungen. Da er inzwischen zum Experten geworden war, wurde er von 1920 bis zur Pensionierung im Jahre 1937 im Außenministerium tätig.
1926 erschien sein Buch „Systeme des Chiffrierens“. Die Herausgabe des zweiten Bandes „Systeme des Dechiffrierens“ wurde ihm jedoch amtlich untersagt, was ihn bis ans Lebensende schmerzte. Unermüdlich weiterarbeitend, wurde er 1960 noch Berater des jungen Bundesheeres. Erst zu seinem 90. Geburtstag wurde ihm eine längst verdiente Ehrung zuteil. 1967 starb der „Altmeister der österreichischen Kryptographie“."

International Journal on Cryptography and Information Security ( IJCIS) is an open access peer reviewed journal that focuses on cutting-edge results in applied cryptography and Information security. It aims to bring together scientists, researchers and students to exchange novel ideas and results in all aspects of cryptography, coding and Information security.

Resumen. Descripciones bibliográficas y análisis técnicos e históricos de los contenidos sobre criptografía y criptoanálisis en tres obras del dominio público, que fueron impresas entre los siglos XVII y XIX y cuyo tema general de fondo son las recreaciones matemáticas y la teoría de la diplomacia. Palabras clave. Historia de la criptología; criptografía; esteganografía; recreaciones matemáticas; diplomacia; William Leybourn; William Hooper; conde Guillaume de Garden. [en] Cryptologic issues in three little known works of mathematical recreations and the theory of diplomacy Abstract. Bibliographic descriptions and some technical and historical analyses of the cryptological contents in three little known books published between the 17th and 19th centuries. These works are concerned with mathematical recreations and the theory of diplomacy.

The Voynich manuscript is the book dated as fifteen century, written using specific and smart coding methods. This article describes the methods how it was analyzed and how coding keys were found. The last manuscript page decoding. Correlation of the last page content with John Dee notes. The proof that the Voynich manuscript and the "Book of Dunstan" - the same manuscripts. This article contains Engish (pages 1-81) and equal Russian (pages 82 - 170) versions.

Ever since the British efforts to break Axis codes and ciphers during the Second World War were declassified in the 1970s, the subject of Government Code and Cipher School, the organisation responsible, Bletchley Park, its wartime headquarters, and the impact of the intelligence on the war has fascinated both historians and the general public. However, little attention has been paid to Bletchley Park as a war station where three-quarters of the personnel was female. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the gender discourse of labour at Bletchley Park and how it relates to the wider context of wartime Britain. This is done through the theoretical concepts of gendering (the assignation of a gender to a job, task or object), horizontal gender segregation (the custom of assigning men and women different jobs) and vertical gender segregation (the state where men hold more prestigious positions in the hierarchy than women).
The primary sources are interviews, letters and memoirs by female veterans of Bletchley Park, kept in Bletchley Park Trust Archive and the Imperial War Museum’s collections, and printed accounts, in total two monographs and five articles. Surviving official documents from Bletchley Park, now kept in the National Archives, are also utilised. Using accounts created by female veterans themselves as the main source material allows for women’s perspectives to be acknowledged and examined. This becomes especially important in a field of research where the focus lies almost exclusively on male actors and their achievements.
The women employed at Bletchley Park (commonly referred to as ‘girls’) were both civilians and servicewomen, generally young and often well-educated, not seldom to university level. Despite this, they were primarily found in supporting positions, such as clerical tasks and machine-minding. Few women can be found higher up in the organisation, or in more prestigious in intelligence work and cryptanalysis. Only a handful of women worked with breaking high-grade ciphers, and seldom without being treated as an honorary man by their coworkers, which allows the team to function as all-male. Factors such as policies on dilution in war industries, patterns in women’s education and the structure of British women’s services form the context of the situation at Bletchley Park, both explaining and reinforcing structures of gendered division of labour.
Keywords: Bletchley Park, gender, Great Britain 1939-1945, intelligence services, Second World War, war-work, women’s work

Resumen: Descripciones, criptoanálisis y comentarios técnicos e históricos a propósito de una serie de criptosistemas utilizados por diversos indi-viduos y grupos políticos en México entre 1907 y 1921. Abstract: Descriptions, analyses and technical and historical commentaries about a number of cryptosystems used by different political groups and individuals in Mexico between 1907 and 1921.