ANALYSIS OF CRYPTO: HOW THE CODE REBELS BEAT THE GOVERNMENT
Today, billions of transactions take place on the Internet on a regular basis. In some cases, only information is exchanged: e-mails are sent or document files are downloaded. In other cases, financial transactions take place: consumers purchase books from Amazon.com using their credit cards, or companies make purchases from one another using purchase order and electronic invoices. Recently, approval was given for banks to process checks electronically rather than requiring the physical check for clearing. This proliferation of e-commerce is made possible because participants in the electronic marketplace have confidence in the security of the transactions. They are confident that the information will not get into the "wrong" hands, and they are confident that if someone sends them information, that the information is in fact coming from the person who is supposed to be sending it, and not someone posing as that person. This confidence in the security of the Internet is due largely to the use of keyed encryption, and while it seems a straightforward process, there was a time in the 1970s and 1980s when the American government fought hard to prevent encryption from becoming a tool for private industry. In his work, Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government, Stephen Levy details the challenges that early proponents of encryption faced in making this technology available to the public.
Secrets have long been a part of human existence. Politicians have sought to keep their communications secrete from their rivals, armies have sought to keep their battle plans secret from their enemies, and even businesses have sought to keep their strategic plans secret from the competition. Julius Caesar is rumored to have developed and used a substitution cipher in which each letter of the alphabet is substituted with a different letter (Levy 6).
Keys are critical to ...