Cryptanalysis Topics

• german ciphers
• national security agency
• electronic digital computer
• plaintext attack
• david kahn
• physical coercion
• skin a cat
• historian david
• quantum computers
• world war ii
• more than one way to skin a cat
• enigma machine
• punched card
• target
• cryptosystems
• european war
• commercial vendors
• 50th anniversary
• ciphertext
• earliest computers

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Cryptanalysis, Cryptanalysis

However, cryptanalysis usually excludes methods of attack that do not primarily target weaknesses in the actual cryptography, such as bribery, physical coercion, burglary, keystroke logging, and social engineering, although these types of attack are an important concern and are often more effective than traditional cryptanalysis.

Moreover, automation was first applied to cryptanalysis in that era with the Polish Bomba device, use of punched card equipment, and in the Colossus one of the earliest computers (arguably the first programmable electronic digital computer).

Taken as a whole, modern cryptography has become much more impervious to cryptanalysis than the pen-and-paper systems of the past, and now seems to have the upper hand against pure cryptanalysis. The historian David Kahn notes, "Many are the cryptosystems offered by the hundreds of commercial vendors today that cannot be broken by any known methods of cryptanalysis. Indeed, in such systems even a chosen plaintext attack, in which a selected plaintext is matched against its ciphertext, cannot yield the key that unlock other messages. In a sense, then, cryptanalysis is dead. But that is not the end of the story. Cryptanalysis may be dead, but there is - to mix my metaphors - more than one way to skin a cat." . David Kahn, Remarks on the 50th Anniversary of the National Security Agency , November 1, 2002. Kahn goes on to mention increased opportunities for interception, bugging, side channel attacks and quantum computers as replacements for the traditional means of cryptanalysis.

In World War II, the cryptanalysis of the German ciphers including the Enigma machine and the Lorenz cipher has been credited with everything between shortening the end of the European war by a few months to determining the eventual result (see ULTRA). The United States also benefited from the cryptanalysis of the Japanese PURPLE code (see MAGIC).

In 2004, it was reported that the United States had broken Iranian ciphers. (It is unknown, however, whether this was pure cryptanalysis, or whether other factors were involved: [1] ).

Such ciphers invariably rely on "hard" mathematical problems as the basis of their security, so an obvious point of attack is to develop methods for solving the problem. The security of two-key cryptography depends on mathematical questions in a way that single-key cryptography generally does not, and conversely links cryptanalysis to wider mathematical research in a new way.

Source: Wikipedia > Cryptanalysis