Cryptography

"If all the personal computers in the world —approximately 260 million computers— were to be put to work on a single PGP encrypted message, it would take on average an estimated 12 million times the age of the universe to break a single message."
~William Crowell, Deputy Director of the National Security Agency, 1997

I went to the National Cryptologic Museum recently and enjoyed seeing various ways ciphers have been used over time. Have you heard of the Navajo Code Talkers from World War II? The Navajo language itself turned out to be an unbreakable code. (My kids like Code Talker: A Novel about the Navajo Marines of World War Two by Joseph Bruchac.)

I'm including a couple of shots (not mine) from the National Cryptologic Museum below this Khan Academy video. For more Khan Academy cryptography videos, click here.

What is Cryptography?


Johannes Balthasar Friderici's Cryptography or Secret Correspondence, 1684
Taken at the National Cryptologic Museum, NSA.
photo by ideonexus

Herbern Electric Code Machine, 1918
Taken at the National Cryptologic Museum, NSA.
photo by ideonexus

The CIA's Kryptos sculpture
photo by the sculptor, Jim Sanborn
Kryptos is an encrypted sculpture by American artist Jim Sanborn located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia. Since its dedication on November 3, 1990, there has been much speculation about the meaning of the encrypted messages it bears. Of the four messages, three have been solved, with the fourth remaining one of the most famous unsolved codes in the world. The sculpture continues to provide a diversion for cryptanalysts, both amateur and professional, who are attempting to decrypt the final section. (info from Wikipedia)

Poznań monument to Polish cryptologists who helped break Germany's Enigma machine ciphers
photo by Ziko

A giant copy of the Rosetta Stone
by Joseph Kosuth in Figeac, France, the birthplace of Jean-François Champollion

16th century French cypher machine in the shape of a book
photographed at Musee d'Ecouen

Cipher Pyramid
photo by Marcin Wichary

1945 Captain Midnight decoder badge
photo by Sobebunny

Links:

* Steganography, sending messages that don't seem like messages at all
* Classical Cryptography
* Kryptos: A coded sculpture at CIA headquarters has yet to be fully broken.
* Make your own wallet-sized Enigma-like machine
* The KidsMakeStuff Cipher Disk