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History
6 posts tagged History.
William Friedman: when codebreaking became a science
Around 1920, William Friedman showed how counting coincidences between letters could break ciphers, and brought rigorous statistics into codebreaking.
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Alan Turing and Bletchley Park: codebreaking and computing
At Bletchley Park, Alan Turing and thousands of colleagues read enemy messages at scale. Their work helped shape the war and the computer age.
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Babbage, Kasiski and the Vigenère cipher: how it fell
For centuries the Vigenère cipher was called indecipherable. Then Babbage and Kasiski found that its repeats reveal the key.
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The one-time pad: Vernam, Mauborgne and the perfect cipher
A teleprinter cipher from 1917, made perfect by one rule: a truly random key, used once. It can never be broken, and it comes with a catch.
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Al-Kindi and frequency analysis: the first codebreaker
In ninth-century Baghdad, al-Kindi wrote the earliest surviving guide to breaking ciphers. His key insight: letters give themselves away.
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Kerckhoffs's principle (1883): the secret is the key
In 1883 Auguste Kerckhoffs argued that a cipher should stay safe even if the enemy knows how it works. It still shapes how security is judged.
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Trust that travels.
Secure, trusted and under your control.