43 pages • 1 hour read
Simon SinghThe Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: Pretty Good Privacy
With the advent of digital technology, widespread access to cryptography became necessary. The tension in the modern age is between the vast majority of people who will use this technology in an acceptable and law-abiding way to live their lives and the few who would use it for nefarious purposes: “As well as protecting the communications of law-abiding citizens, encryption also protects the communications of criminals and terrorists” (393). With digital communication, the task of intercepting messages has become exponentially easier, and with this development, the task of keeping limits on its use is far more important.
The technology needs to be permissible for legitimate needs while simultaneously allowing for law enforcement to catch criminals. It also needs to be regulated to keep government oversight from overstepping its bounds. Phil Zimmerman was one of the men at the forefront of keeping cryptological technology both within its proper bounds and within reach of the average person. Zimmerman developed a system that used a combination of asymmetric and symmetric encryption and that operated within an interface that would allow the average person to use it without any real knowledge of how the technology worked. He called it “Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP for short” (397). PGP allowed users to make secure transactions online, as well as allowing users to send verified and verifiable emails that would guarantee privacy.
Skirting a number of issues with the technology’s promulgation, Zimmerman eventually released the software to the public, where it began to be adopted by users and businesses all over the world. The two problems Zimmerman dealt with were the need to get a license for the RSA encryption patent and the need to deal with government interference in pushing for the criminalization of encryption technology that would ban PGP: “Rather than waiting and risk PGP being banned by the government, he decided that it was more important for it to be available to everybody before it was too late” (402). Even though Zimmerman dealt with legal problems for years, PGP was widely adopted and Zimmerman was vindicated.
The conflict with Zimmerman over PGP revealed a number of underlying tensions in the advent of public encryption, specifically between law enforcement or government overseers and civil libertarians. Government oversight and law enforcement want to maintain the status quo of being able to monitor people and organizations for criminal activity, while civil libertarians want to ensure the rights of private individuals and corporations to privacy. The argument, as they frame it, revolves around “the advent of digital technology, which makes monitoring so much easier, [and that] will herald a new era of wiretapping and the abuses that inevitably follow” (407).
Eventually, the use of encryption technology became so widespread that it has become impossible to stop, and most suggestions at ways to remove or mitigate the prevalence of cryptography in the realm of personal privacy have stalled. In the future, the attitudes toward encryption will largely hinge on who the public fears more: dangerous criminals against whom one needs to defend oneself or a dangerously overstepping government intent on disallowing privacy.
Chapter 8 Summary: A Quantum Leap into the Future
Encryption technology has advanced more over the last century than it did in the entire history of encryption efforts combined. The challenge is to predict where encryption efforts will go in the future.
Many different efforts are being tried and implemented, as well as efforts to prevent decryption attacks. The use of electromagnetic shielding in offices where information is kept and the use of—and defense against—computer viruses and trojan horse applications are methods being used in the information war. In regard to encryption/decryption theory, matters appear to be at a standstill:
Without much hope of a theoretical breakthrough, cryptanalysts have been forced to look for a technological innovation. If there is no obvious way to reduce the number of steps required for factoring, then cryptanalysts need a technology that will perform these steps more quickly (424).
With the shift toward developing new technology, the focus is on the possibility of developing a computer powered by quantum technology. Employing quantum mechanics in computer technology would allow such a device to perform calculations and operations at unprecedented speed, enabling multiple calculating processes to occur simultaneously and giving encryption technicians access to the greatest tools ever imagined by humankind.
The idea was first developed by British physicist David Deutsch, who first imagined the concept while attending a conference on computation theory in 1984. Thus far, quantum technology has only been dealt with at a theoretical level, but its applications have been imagined as applying in numerous other areas as well. The possibility of quantum tech being used in money, for instance, in order to create impossible-to-counterfeit bills, was imagined as far back as the 1960s by Stephen Wesiner, a grad student at Columbia University, but it was never realized.
This idea would later inspire two computer scientists, Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard, to develop what they called “quantum encryption” that involved the use of marked and polarized photons. The only problem has been that it only works at essentially useless short distances, so “the challenge has been to build a quantum cryptographic system that operates over useful distances” (461). If it ever developed to a point where it could be used outside of highly specific circumstances and short distances, it would be the apex of encryption technology: “Quantum cryptography is not just effectively unbreakable, it is absolutely unbreakable” (463).
In fact, if it were ever to be discovered that quantum encryption could be cracked, then it would be a problem for the greater scientific community at large: “Indeed, if a message protected by quantum cryptography were ever to be deciphered, it would mean that quantum theory is flawed, which would have devastating implications for physicists” (463).
Chapters 7-8 Analysis
As the author demonstrated in the first chapter in narrating the story of Queen Mary and the plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth, codes and ciphers have always been at the heart of criminal activity. In the past, however, there was only so much damage one could do with a hidden message or a special code. In the modern world, encryption has the power to destroy businesses, cripple nations, and allow for all manner of damage to be done, especially in the financial sector.
The debate of the last few decades has revolved around the legality of public encryption and how it should be implemented in order to maintain the greatest safety. Encryption is at the heart of efforts to make the world a safer place, but it functions as a double-edged sword. Encryption makes the public safer in so many ways: It allows for private emails and text messages to be sent, it allows for secure internet transactions, and it permits different applications to function globally that work to keep people in communication. Encryption has invariably been an objectively good development. The problems appear in the realm of the subjective when something that is perfectly innocuous in itself is used for evil ends.
Those who view encryption skeptically point out the fact that criminals make equal use of the technology to hide their activity from law enforcement and entities that wish to stop them. Ultimately, it seems that the majority of the public has come to view encryption as absolutely necessary for daily living in the 21st century, and so it is viewed in a positive light or, at worst, as a necessary evil that needs to be endured in order for society to function. In many ways, this is certainly true, but the philosophical tension that exists between the two sides is one that will never truly disappear, and if certain nations or governments begin to skew in a more totalitarian or dystopian direction, then the questions will be raised again whether criminal activity or government surveillance poses the larger threat. Only time will tell, and it is conceivable that public attitudes will shift back and forth simply based on time, place, and particular circumstances.
Moving forward, as the author outlines in his final chapter, encryption technology will continue to advance in increasingly impenetrable ways—the latest developments that explore quantum technology are the most exciting (and terrifying) developments to occur in the field to this point. The 20th century saw cryptology evolve from being a science dominated by linguists to one dominated by mathematicians. The 21st century may see the field shift again, this time toward a monopoly of physicists, intent on synthesizing the worlds of cryptology and quantum physics in a way that would take the field into a space that it has never occupied before. Quantum cryptology could create genuinely unbreakable and indecipherable codes—codes made unbreakable not thanks to creativity and randomness, but unrepeatable quantum processes.
