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.

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erivation process as difficult as possible, such as requiring the factoring of a large number. By using encryption techniques such as this that would require immense computing power to break, public key encryption algorithms are typically able to thwart casual intrusion attempts ("What Is" 1). This does not solve the other problem of public key encryption, however, which is ensuring that the person using the private key is the person who is intended to use the private key. Private and public key encryption requires that the recipient have access to a key that will decode the message; it is assumed that since the key is private, only the person who should decode the message will have access to the key. That is not always the case. Through carelessness, users can divulge keys to others without necessarily intending to do so. Keeping lists of passwords and keys in a file on a computer is a common habit, and one that makes keys easy to steal for determined hackers. Some users keep lists on post-it notes next to their monitors. Encryption, in other words, cannot protect against human error and carelessness (Moody 65). Despite these limitations, public key encryption has become a common way for businesses to keep transactions a
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Approximate Word count = 1790
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)