Since the dawn of sending and receiving messages, people have had a need for keeping the information they send out to remain private and out of the hands of others. This need for security is the reason the field of cryptography was developed, from its early stages of moving letters around in words to the present use of computer programming to keep certain data safe. Cryptography is the reason we can securely use many day to day applications, but with all these developments come issues of unwanted government surveillance that threatens the privacy of citizens. These issues may be detrimental to the privacy of the information sent and received but cryptography is here to stay as a necessary means of passing that information from one party to another.
Cryptography began as soon as language and writing were developed, some early forms were the use of hieroglyphics, or the use of secret messages on animal skins to tell stories or to pass along messages. These more primitive methods lead to the Cipher (or Caesar) disk where there were two rings of the alphabet and the inner ring could be moved around within the circle in order to give each outer alphabet characters a new corresponding letter (Ellison). This process was known as transposition, where letters would be moved around in a uniform way by “adding” to a letter in order to get a new one for instance A+2 is C. This was a very useful way to send messages, but there were only 26 possibilities because there are only so many letters in the alphabet so the messages could be hacked fairly easily. As civilizations began to develop and technology improved, the ideas and methods became more advanced and mathematics began to be involved which started the idea of substitution where each letter was replaced with another. The most general substitution cipher has 26! amount of possibilities- this corresponds to around 10^(23) possibilities (Singh). This extremely high number made it impossible for the message to be cracked in the time it was popular, and even today it would take a computer and entire day to go through all of the possibilities and find the right one. Cryptography became more advanced and secretive which encouraged people to think outside the box on how to break the ciphers which is where the term cryptanalysis, or code breaking, came from. When substitution was still the primary form of encryption the cryptanalysts noticed that each replacement letter would take on all of characteristics of the old letter which allowed for frequency analysis to develop. Cryptanalysts noticed that the letter E was the most commonly used letter in the alphabet (13% of all letters used) so if the letter E was replaced by the letter W then W would appear 13% of the time. From here the cryptanalysts studied all of the letters in the alphabet to see which letters were most or least likely and from there could break the cipher of the messages they intercepted (Singh). Once this process was figured out it became easier to crack any substitution cipher because each letter was only represented by one other letter. The creation of the Enigma machine became the next step in the field of cryptography to combat frequency analysis. The Enigma machine had three parts: the input keyboard, the output lampboard and the scrambling device. The scrambling device was the key to making the machine unbreakable for so long because after each letter was inputted, the scrambling mode changed which in turn changed the output value of the input letter so that multiple A’s wouldn’t all come out as T’s but would be multiple different letters (Crawford). The code for what each letter represented was changed …show more content…
The government needs to ensure that any sensitive information they have stays with only them, but there are constant threats to that privacy. On the other had if there is information being passed around on an encrypted message and the government needs to know about it because it poses a security threat they should be able to hack into that message in order to keep their country safe. Because of both these viewpoints most governments feel the needs to have a huge amount of control over what is happening inside their area in order to maintain order and
Cryptography began as soon as language and writing were developed, some early forms were the use of hieroglyphics, or the use of secret messages on animal skins to tell stories or to pass along messages. These more primitive methods lead to the Cipher (or Caesar) disk where there were two rings of the alphabet and the inner ring could be moved around within the circle in order to give each outer alphabet characters a new corresponding letter (Ellison). This process was known as transposition, where letters would be moved around in a uniform way by “adding” to a letter in order to get a new one for instance A+2 is C. This was a very useful way to send messages, but there were only 26 possibilities because there are only so many letters in the alphabet so the messages could be hacked fairly easily. As civilizations began to develop and technology improved, the ideas and methods became more advanced and mathematics began to be involved which started the idea of substitution where each letter was replaced with another. The most general substitution cipher has 26! amount of possibilities- this corresponds to around 10^(23) possibilities (Singh). This extremely high number made it impossible for the message to be cracked in the time it was popular, and even today it would take a computer and entire day to go through all of the possibilities and find the right one. Cryptography became more advanced and secretive which encouraged people to think outside the box on how to break the ciphers which is where the term cryptanalysis, or code breaking, came from. When substitution was still the primary form of encryption the cryptanalysts noticed that each replacement letter would take on all of characteristics of the old letter which allowed for frequency analysis to develop. Cryptanalysts noticed that the letter E was the most commonly used letter in the alphabet (13% of all letters used) so if the letter E was replaced by the letter W then W would appear 13% of the time. From here the cryptanalysts studied all of the letters in the alphabet to see which letters were most or least likely and from there could break the cipher of the messages they intercepted (Singh). Once this process was figured out it became easier to crack any substitution cipher because each letter was only represented by one other letter. The creation of the Enigma machine became the next step in the field of cryptography to combat frequency analysis. The Enigma machine had three parts: the input keyboard, the output lampboard and the scrambling device. The scrambling device was the key to making the machine unbreakable for so long because after each letter was inputted, the scrambling mode changed which in turn changed the output value of the input letter so that multiple A’s wouldn’t all come out as T’s but would be multiple different letters (Crawford). The code for what each letter represented was changed …show more content…
The government needs to ensure that any sensitive information they have stays with only them, but there are constant threats to that privacy. On the other had if there is information being passed around on an encrypted message and the government needs to know about it because it poses a security threat they should be able to hack into that message in order to keep their country safe. Because of both these viewpoints most governments feel the needs to have a huge amount of control over what is happening inside their area in order to maintain order and