Crypto Wars: 2000 Years of Cipher Evolution

The battle of wits between codemakers and codebreakers has been the driving force for innovation in cipher technology for centuries. Every time the codemakers invented the next advance in cipher technology, the codebreakers would find some ingenious way to break that cipher. This book explores the evolution of these crypto devices and the dramatic consequences codebreaking made to history. This is also a pictorial guide, highlighting a wide variety of cipher technology.

The science of cryptology is shrouded in secrecy and confusion. The veil is often lifted on these secrets many decades or centuries after the fact, forcing us to re-examine and rewrite that history. Since the invention of many cipher technologies are kept secret for many years, they have been traditionally credited to the wrong inventors. Examples include: the Enigma machine, the Vigenère disk, the one-time pad, the Jefferson wheel cypher, the Wheatstone cipher and even modern public key encryption!

As an example of history being rewritten, the knowledge of the Allies breaking the Nazi Enigma code in WW2 was kept secret for 29 years, despite over 15,000 people working to break that code. In today’s world of WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden and the internet, it is hard to fathom how this bombshell story was kept secret for so long. Now, the historic impact of the Allies breaking the Enigma code is better understood. By some estimates, it shortened the war by two years, saving millions of lives.

The cipher wheel was invented by Etienne Bazeries, a French army officer, in 1891 and again independently in 1922 by Joseph O. Mauborgne of the US Army. Coincidentally, in 1922 a description of a "wheel cypher" was found in the writings of Thomas Jefferson. Yes, our third president previously invented this very innovative and user friendly cipher device in the mid 1790s, which was in use by the US military until 1943! Now, even the history of this 1922 US invention has been rewritten, with credit going to Parker Hitt's invention of the wheel and strip versions of this cipher in 1912.

The invention of the electromechanical rotor cipher was credited to 4 independent inventors in 4 countries near the end of WW1. It was finally discovered in 2003 that this pivotal innovation was actually invented several years earlier, in 1915. Now, history has been rewritten on the invention of the most infamous cipher machine of them all, the Enigma, with credit going to two Dutch naval officers, Theo van Hengel and Rudolf Spengler.

The only cipher that is mathematically proven to be completely unbreakable is the one-time pad. Even this perfect cipher has been broken, however, when not used correctly. This caused historic consequences for Germany in WW2 and for the Soviet Union during the cold war. This cipher technology was credited to the wrong inventors for almost 100 years. It was thought to be invented by Gilbert Vernam and Joseph O. Mauborgne in 1919, but a 2011 discovery proved it was published in a code book by a Sacramento banker, Frank Miller, 37 years earlier in 1882.

When cryptanalysis fails, espionage is the logical next step in the battle of wits. The US National Security Agency “back-door” into the Hagelin cipher gave the US an open book into the military, diplomatic and government secrets of over 100 countries for four decades. This represents one of the greatest stings in history!

Recent news of wholesale gathering of phone metadata by the NSA on hundreds of millions of people captivated and appalled people worldwide, but even more consequential is the fact they broke into public key encryption by using backdoors in popular software programs and by sheer brute force computing.

As the battle of wits between codemakers and codebreakers continues to escalate, it is guaranteed to produce more ingenious technologies and surprising revisions to history for years to come.