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Sunday, December 27, 2009 - 5:39 PM
Although frequency analysis is a powerful and general technique
against many ciphers, encryption has still been often effective in
practice; many a would-be cryptanalyst was unaware of the technique.
Breaking a message without using frequency analysis essentially
required knowledge of the cipher used and perhaps of the key involved,
thus making espionage, bribery, burglary, defection, etc. more
attractive approaches to the cryptanalyticly uninformed. It was finally
explicitly recognized in the 19th century that secrecy of a cipher's
algorithm is not a sensible nor practical safeguard of message
security; in fact, it was further realized that any adequate
cryptographic scheme (including ciphers) should remain secure even if
the adversary fully understands the cipher algorithm itself. Security
of the key used should alone be sufficient for a good cipher to
maintain confidentiality under an attack. This fundamental principle
was first explicitly stated in 1883 by Auguste Kerckhoffs and is generally called Kerckhoffs' principle; alternatively and more bluntly, it was restated by Claude Shannon, the inventor of information theory and the fundamentals of theoretical cryptography, as Shannon's Maxim — 'the enemy knows the system'.
Various physical devices and aids have been used to assist with ciphers. One of the earliest may have been the scytale of ancient Greece,
a rod supposedly used by the Spartans as an aid for a transposition
cipher (see image above). In medieval times, other aids were invented
such as the cipher grille,
which was also used for a kind of steganography. With the invention of
polyalphabetic ciphers came more sophisticated aids such as Alberti's
own cipher disk, Johannes Trithemius' tabula recta scheme, and Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire's multi-cylinder (not publicly known, and reinvented independently by Bazeries
around 1900). Many mechanical encryption/decryption devices were
invented early in the 20th century, and several patented, among them rotor machines — famously including the Enigma machine used by the German government and military from the late 20s and during World War II.[7]
The ciphers implemented by better quality examples of these machine
designs brought about a substantial increase in cryptanalytic
difficulty after WWI
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