Encryption Devices
Encryption is the process of converting text into code. Encryption devices are the machines that perform the actual encrypting. Such machines have existed throughout history. Though encryption began more as a need in war than commerce, in the late twentieth century, the latter has taken precedent, especially as more and more business is conducted electronically and digitally.
One of the first encryption devices, the skytale, was devised by the Spartans in the fifth century b.c.. The skytale was a wooden staff, and text was written length-wise on papyrus or the like wrapped tightly around the staff. When the papyrus was unwrapped and delivered, it looked nonsensical until rewrapped around a skytale of the similar thickness. By the late nineteenth century, Thomas Jefferson invented a cipher wheel, a simple encryption device which featured two disks. The alphabet was on one, and the other featured its scrambled counterpart.
By the early twentieth century, rotor-based encryption devices became popular. The Enigma machine was invented in 1918 by Arthur Scherbius, a German electrical engineer. On the outside, Enigma looked somewhat like a typewriter with a display. When typing in text, the display shows the cipher. When decoding, the display features the decoded text. Inside, Enigma featured an electromechanical rotor system for converting the typed text into code, and vice versa. Each time a letter was typed on the Enigma keyboard, each rotor would turn and the letter would undergo up to six individual transcriptions. If the same letter was typed again, it would not be coded the same because of the individual rotor turns. Though initially unwanted by German business or government, the latter began to find military applications for Enigma by 1926. Then Germany also continued to improve Enigma over the years, making it both smaller and more powerful. Thus, Enigma's code was not solved by the Allies in World War II until 1940, but only with the help of information bought from a German involved with the machine. The Americans also had several encryption devices of their own at this time, including SIGABA, a United States Navy machine that eventually became the standard for all branches of the American military in the early 1940s. SIGABA, also known as Converter M-134-C, was also an electrical rotor-based device.
These encryption devices are primitive when compared with possibilities generated by a computer and computer software, and business has become the primary customer as more and more transactions are handled over electronically. Cryptographic software is used to encode these transactions, from ATM machines and credit card verifications to illegal activities such as insider trading and drug sales, as well as communication on the Internet and over cellular telephones. The programs, such as Pretty Good Privacy and SynCrypt, have become nearly impossible to crack. These programs have their roots in a late 1970s invention by several scholars at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With their public-key encryption, a message is sent with both its encoding and decoding keys. The keys themselves are based on complex mathematics, so the just knowing the encoding key would not allow an interceptor to read the message. The United States government has placed limitations on the export of the strongest (i.e., most mathematically complex) encryption software, and there has been debate in the late 1990s as to if the government should hold the keys to such software or even banned outright if it is uncrackable. Rulings have generally been against such a key, but this is still an on-going discussion.
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