THE RACE FOR ADVANCED ENCRYPTION

Strong encryption hasn’t always been freely available to the public. Nate Drake tells the story of how the first Data Encryption Standard transformed the cryptography landscape.

In the introduction to his awesome treatise on the history of cryptography, The Code Book, Simon Singh likens the ongoing battle between those who seek to keep communications secret and the consequent efforts of others to expose them to an intellectual “arms race.” It’s easy to be smug about older ciphers, such as the Caesar cipher, which simply shifts each letter in the message three places, A becoming D, B becoming E, and so on. These kinds of monoalphabetic ciphers are so easy to crack, Edgar Allan Poe even used to run a column breaking enciphered messages sent in by readers of Alexander Weekly Messenger. The arrival of affordable computers in the ’60s didn’t initially herald a new wave of encryption. Secure cryptography was still the preserve of governments, though…

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APC (Digital) - 1 Issue, January 2025

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