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The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography QUOTES

The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography QUOTES

61 " Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were guilty of unjustified wiretaps, and President John F. Kennedy conducted dubious wiretaps in the first month of his presidency. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

62 " The three Britons had to sit back and watch as their discoveries were rediscovered by Diffie, Hellman, Merkle, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman over the next three years. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

63 " Chinese wrote messages on fine silk, which was then scrunched into a tiny ball and covered in wax. The messenger would then swallow the ball of wax. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

64 " He was a rather quirky worker, and he didn’t really fit into the day-to-day business of GCHQ. But in terms of coming up with new ideas he was quite exceptional. You had to sort through some rubbish sometimes, but he was very innovative and always willing to challenge the orthodoxy. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

65 " The first microdot to be spotted by the FBI was in 1941, following a tip-off that the Americans should look for a tiny gleam from the surface of a letter, indicative of smooth film. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

66 " We would be in real trouble if everybody in GCHQ was like him, but we can tolerate a higher proportion of such people than most organizations. We put up with a number of people like him. Figure 66 James Ellis. (photo credit 6.4) One of Ellis’s greatest qualities was his breadth of knowledge. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

67 " first ever military cryptographic device, the Spartan scytale, dating back to the fifth century B.C. The scytale is a wooden staff around which a strip of leather or parchment is wound, "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

68 " The German military were equally unenthusiastic, because they were oblivious to the damage caused by their insecure ciphers during the Great War. For example, they had been led to believe that the Zimmermann telegram had been stolen by American spies in Mexico, and so they blamed that failure on Mexican security. They still did not realize that the telegram had in fact been intercepted and deciphered by the British, and that the Zimmermann debacle was actually a failure of German cryptography. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

69 " Because a quantum computer deals with 1’s and 0’s that are in a quantum superposition, they are called quantum bits, or qubits (pronounced “cubits”). The advantage of qubits becomes even clearer when we consider more particles. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

70 " diagonally polarized photons are in a quantum quandary when confronted by a vertical Polaroid filter. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

71 " half of them at random will be blocked, and half will pass through, and those that do pass through will be reoriented with a vertical polarization. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

72 " significance of the key, as opposed to the algorithm, is an enduring principle of cryptography. It was definitively stated in 1883 by the Dutch linguist Auguste Kerckhoffs von Nieuwenhof in his book La Cryptographie militaire: “Kerckhoffs’ Principle: The security of a cryptosystem must not depend on keeping secret the crypto-algorithm. The security depends only on keeping secret the key. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

73 " 250 qubits, it is possible to represent roughly 1075 combinations, which is greater than the number of atoms in the universe. If it were possible to achieve the appropriate superposition with 250 particles, then a quantum computer could perform 1075 simultaneous computations, "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

74 " The letters a and l are the most common in Arabic, partly because of the definite article al-, whereas the letter j appears only a tenth as frequently. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

75 " For decades, ENIAC, not Colossus, was considered the mother of all computers. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

76 " NSA employs more mathematicians, buys more computer hardware, and intercepts more messages than any other organization in the world. It is the world leader when it comes to snooping. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

77 " In the 1970s, banks attempted to distribute keys by employing special dispatch riders who had been vetted and who were among the company’s most trusted employees. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

78 " dispatch riders would race across the world with padlocked briefcases, personally distributing keys to everyone who would receive messages from the bank over the next week. As business networks grew in size, as more messages were sent, and as more keys had to be delivered, the banks found that this distribution process became a horrendous logistical nightmare, and the overhead costs became prohibitive. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

79 " alphabetic scripts tend to have between 20 and 40 characters (Russian, for example, has 36 signs, and Arabic has 28). "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

80 " When ships carrying COMSEC material came into dock, crypto-custodians would march onboard, collect stacks of cards, paper tapes, floppy disks, or whatever other medium the keys might be stored on, and then deliver them to the intended recipients. "

― Simon Singh , The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography