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Encryption - coming soon to a PC near you....

Sunday 7th February 2010

"Secrecy" is almost the same as "Confidentiality", but it is a great deal easier to say!

Ciphers, more commonly known as "Secret Codes", have been around for a very long time.  Even Julius Caesar used them.  In his day, most people could not read and write, so simple ciphers wer perfectly adequate.  As the standard of literacy has improved over the centuries, so has the standard of ciphers.  One of the most famous is that used by the Nazis for their Enigma machines.  In its day, this cipher was so advanced that it required the considerable expertise of Alan Turing and his team at Bletchley Park to break it.

Although it used to be said that "Any code that man can make, man can break", this is no longer true.  Modern AES encryption techniques, which are based on calculations involving massive prime numbers, are able to generate ciphers so secure as to be unbreakable within any realistic timescale.  Although they are difficult to break, these ciphers are easy to make.  Indeed, they are well within the capabilities of any modern PC, being used with those "secure" websites which have the prefix "https://" in the browser's address bar and the little padlock symbol in the bottom right corner of the screen.

Since unauthorised access to information on a PC is potentially such a serious matter when a Ministry of Defence laptop is left in a taxi or on a train, park bench, etc., it will not be long before all operating systems will automatically encrypt everything on the hard disk.

There is still one form of cipher which will always be unbreakable.  This is the technique of "Word Substitution".  On 6 June 1944, the Allies landed on "Omaha Beach" - the codename for an area of the French coast near Sainte-Honorine-des-Pertes.  Nearby was another landing area, "Utah Beach".  The important point is that neither codename gives any clue to its real location.  Omaha is actually the largest city in the state of Nebraska, in the US Midwest.  Like Nebraska, the US state of Utah is entirely landlocked.  Indeed, Utah is over 500 miles from the Pacific Ocean, while Nebraska is over 1500 miles away!