quantum cryptology website

I just found a website that related to our topic discussed on Friday. Yes! The pretty difficult cryptology--- Quantum Cryptology! This website explain it very detailed. Hope it is helpful.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-myths/quantum-cryptology.htm

bitcoin

I am really confused that how should we classify bitcoin? Should it be classified as virtual goods or currency?

If bitcoin is classified as currency, it is not legally recognized by any country around the world. And there exists vaious trouble such as, the exchange rate, the trading place, the surveillant agency and even the whole conrresbondly currency system has not been established.

If bitcoin is classified as virtual goods, it still appear some problems. For example, if we use bitcoin in transaction, it means exchanging goods with goods. Though, it is protected by law, it will bring some trouble to government, such as tax returns, absence of regulator system and so on.

Bitcoin can develop economics situation and reduce inflation and deflation. However, the application of bitcoin need to be considered much deep.

Surveillance

We have talked a lot about surveillance on internet. Indeed, it is very controvertable debate just like every coin has two sides.

First, I want to talk about the surveillance on work. Business secrets are potentially valuable to rival companies. To steel documents, industrial spies use the tools and methods of a secret agent, and to protect the same documents, business will use some devices to help monitor employees, for the espionage threat that may come from inside the company.

As more business is done over the internet, people realize the importance of secretly accessing a person's emails and computer files for sales and products information. People could use a software called Robotic spy software, which can be emailed to a target's computer as a photo, music file or a greeting card. Once inside, the software infects the computer and sends secret copies of the user's emails an files to the spy over the internet.The more common method is using video cameras to spy on employees.

Just like surveillance on work. Government may use surveillance on internet to catch criminals activities. But during the surveillance, it will destroy private and liberty. And it may lead to the government abuse of surveillance right. I think it is necessary to monitor, but not for everyone. Just like doing a research, we need to pick up some samples.

watch out

I have hear a lot of cases like that: Some people deciphered your password and logged in your Skype account. Then, they found your contacts and just talked to your friends and even your parents. Of course, things were not so simple. They would make some excuses to ask your parents to send money to the intended bank account. If you could not find in time and connect to your friends and parents. The criminal succeeded.

In nowadays society, almost every young people will use internet to do various things: shopping on line, reading news, books, articles, chatting with friends, parents, booking different tickets, seeing movies, vedeos, writing blogs, essays and so on. We have leaked out so many personal information online, such as bank account information, family members' contacts, school information and so on. Those information are important and if were used by criminals, it would cause a great loss and demage.

So, the security of internet is very crutial for people because it recorded abundant private information.

emergency of cryptology

After I reading the article about the application of cryptology in medicine，I realized that cryptology is not only important in military or national security affairs, it is also necessary in medicine .

There is a number of people depending on the medical device to cure their disease and to survive. Doctors treat patients by controling the device. But then, it appears a problem that if criminals handle this control, it brings danger to patients.

In this case, if the device can be controlled without cryptology, it is harmful for medicine and will damage social stability. However, medical devices are always small in order to implant to patients' bodies conveniently and safely. As a result, it becomes a serious problem for medical scientists to design the devices with cryptology function.

Though it is difficult but it is really necessary to invent such equipment to improve the security in medical devices. Hope there will be an advanced technology to solve this problem.

seeing the invisible

It is known to us all that people usually apply visual methods to keep secrets. For example, in the story " The Poisoned Pen", the murderer uses invisible inks to implement crime. It is really hard for people to detect such invisible evidence.

However, spies need to build such skills and use technology to make their vision keener. There are various kinds of tools help them see the invisible.

Magnifying lenses, which can zoom in, give people a closer view of private scenes. In additon, some photograph subjects in near darkness can still work. They carry with infrared light source, or night-vision optics, producing better photographys of documents. Such equipment gives spies abilities to see in very dim light. Also, they use the equipment looks like today's binoculars using angled mirror to see special scene.

It remind me of Detective Dee. I saw this movie yesterday night. Becuase of the struggle for power in Palace, some people use poison dissolved in water to kill people. I think such measure also belongs to invisible method because water will not attract people's attention and will not arise people's suspicion.

Animal spies

Have you heard animal spies before? It is creative to train animals to support or even replace the work of human agents.

Animal is rarely viewed with suspicion and tend to be left out because they often appear in our surroundings. Animals usually be trained as messengers or listener-in.

During World War 2, pigeons not only acted as secret message carriers but also like a scout. They were trained to fly along specific routes and then released carrying tiny cameras that took photos automatically at specific intevals revealing the location of enemy forces.

As for dog, one of the most familiar animals for people, they were used for the best messengers in the war because of their fast speed and sensitive sense of smell. When it was too dark, or too foggy, wet for people and pigeons, they can still work.

Moreover, people implanted electronic device into animals like microphone, transmitter and battery. But I just wonder did it demage animal's health, such as reduce their life?

The US Navy uses specially trained dolphins and sea lions to patrol harbors. Besides, people also train the mice, Sphinx moths and so on.

secret toolkit

We could see many spys and some secret toolkits on movie. But what exact types of secret toolkit that spys apply in history or even current society?

I read the book named "Spy", which is written by Richard Platt. It is all about spys and other things related with spy. The most interesting part is the secret toolkit. There are various types of methods to provide convenience for spys' work and safety.

The most expressed method is the hidden card. In World War 2, spys used a pack of playing card to conceal maps in order to help plan escape. They torn each card apart revealed a small area of the map. The playing cards fit together like a puzzle.

In addition, spys usually need to take some picture or record some conversation. It is very important for them to apply proper methods to prevent from disclosing. So, there are two intellengent equipment. The first one is supersmall snapper. This tinny digital cameral concealed inside a cigarette ligter case, which could be carried in s spy's pocket to be available when an opportunity arose to take a secret picture. This tool could help spys to take photographys without attracting attention. The other one is listening pen. This pen is inconspicuous in the pocket and would not attract attention in a dest drawer. It concealed a microphone to ecesdrop on an nearby conversation.

There till so many different types of secret toolkits in this book. It is very interesting to know such amazing methods.

improtant!!

I have heard that a boy showed his affection to a girl and asked the girl whether or not she wants to be his girlfriend. And you know what? The girl did not say neither "yes" or "no", but left a encrypted message. She said if the boy could decode the message, she would be his girlfriend.

It is interesting right? So, this story shows another importance of the knowledge about cryptology. :)

Endless War

After reading the article about DirecTV. I found the war between DirecTV and hacking community just likes that between codemakers and codebreakers. It requires advanced technology and carefulness. It is a war without smoke and irrelated with military. However, it damages both producers and consumers' benefits and security.

I just wonder whether or not there is some law designed for banning hackers' attack and then protecting public safety. In some way, the fighting between DirecTV and hacking community can promote development of technology. Nonetheless, overall, it is not good for society's stability and will cause a great amount of loss for coporations and customers.

As for code itself, "h" card is the main key in the whole case. DirecTV try improving the technique to protect the cards' information and destroying the cards, which were caught by hacking community. While hacking community just want to catch the satellite stream and gain the cards' information and then change them.

The procedure repeats again and again, and then the war between DirecTV and hacking community is endless.

thoughs about cryptology

There is an idea comming up that what do other people think about cryptology. And then, I do a research about this question and ask eight people.

The first person answered: Well, I it is about deciphering…spy…

The second person said: I think it is about mystery.

The third person said: In my mind, it just about secret, some important information related to military secrets…something like that.

The forth person said: It is about calculation, math…

The fifth person replied: It is a hard question to answer because cryptology involves a lot of knowledge and subjects. I do not think I can answer it ……

The sixth person answered: About code? telegram? War?

The seventh person answered: I really have no ideas about cryptology, can you tell me?……

The last person said: I am really interested about cryptology just because it represents to mystery, to disclose some hidden truth.

See, “There are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people's eyes”. Different people have different understanding about cryptology.

language barrier

There are various culture and languages around the world. Because of such diversity, different groups of people living in different areas do not know other groups of people's language. People living in current society also have no ideas about ancient languages if the language has changed a lot or even has been extinct.

In the chapter 5 of "The Code Book",cryptographers cooperate with archeologers working on abstruse symbols, which represents different meanings in an ancient language. It is very difficult to figure out the exact meaning of each symbols without any knowledge about the type of language.

Based on the place, where archeologer unearth the materials with those symbols on it, people who are proficient in the language will start work, like comparing those language to other language which used near the discovery place.

According to "The Code Book", I found cryptology relates to many other subjects such as language, math, archeology, geography,physics, chemistry and so on.

Because of combination of various fields, cryptology seems like whimsical riddle, which strongly incites people's curiosity.

promote equity

Most time, people utilize code to keep secret secure. For example, military always has special organization to create code in order to keep crucial communication secure as well as to break enemies' code in order to gain important information. As for daily life, some people will apply code to prevent other people from reading their private blog, only someone who know the author's password can have access to read it.

Actually, code can also promote equity. In our accounting class, sometimes, we have to do quiz on the computer. In order to prevent some student do the quiz earlier or even leak out the question to others, professor set the code. Only until professor tells us the code we could do quiz. In addition, professor will change the code at next quiz. As a result, it promote equity that every one knows the quiz at the first time and starts the quiz at nearly the same time.

always change password

I find when I logged in my account on college's computer, it will remind me of changing my password. Have you found it?

It seems a little bit inconvenient for us to change the password from time to time. In addition, because we can not just use the most familiar and frequently used password forever, it increases the possibility that we forget the password.

So, is it necessary to change our college account password nearly every two months? Maybe it could somewhat keep our accounts at high level of security. What about your idears?

cryptology puzzle

I found a very interesting website about cryptology puzzle!!

http://www.mindfun.com/crypto/

However, it does not tell us the type of cryptology only provide answer.

Try it!

can you udnersatnd?

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, It deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are,the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae.The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm.

It seems interesting, right? So, I just wonder if it is right, the sender can mix the order of words in plain text and then compile it. May be it can raise the difficulty to decipher...

Secret everywhere

Cryptology is widely applied in multifarious aspects in our life: From business, government to even game, private events.

For example, it is familiar to us that most online games will require you to create a password to access to the game. But more interesting, some interactive games could let yourself set a password so that the person who are told about the password by you can access the game, other people can not access. It help people to reserve place in games.

As for private events, I remembered that when I was a child, I wrote a cipher letter to my friend just for fun. It looks a little bit childish now, but we enjoyed it very well. We felt a little bit glory that nobody else know what we talked about. It is beyond keeping secrets.

Have you created such cipher letter since you were born?

codemakers vs codebreakers

For thousands of years, the battle between code makers and code breakers never stop. After reading a lot of information about cryptology, a question flashing to my mind: who is the winner during the evolution of codes?

From some people's point of views, code makers stand at the dominant position than code breakers. Considering the first secret message created by someone, no body apart from the sender and intended recipient knew about the contents of the message. This message would at very high level of security because few people touched cryptology in that time. This situation leaded to the superiority for code makers to protect communication.

However, with accelerated development of cryptology, an increasing number of people have knowlege about cryptology. Code makers lose their advantage in cryptology because some people break their cryptoloty and disclose the cipher text, most important, key and principles. As a result, everyone who know the approach to compile the message and it utterly damage the security.

"The ongoing battle between code makers and code breakers has inspired a whole series of remarkable scientific breakthroughs." When the code breakers decipher the codes, the code makers will try their best to create a new one. So, it is not difficult to understand during the codes history, people sometimes conceal the fact that they have already broken the cipher text to prevent enemies from creating new cipher method.

So, historically, code breakers seem like winners, because no matter how unbreakable the cryptology is, eventually, it will be broken by code breakers.

I just wonder whether or not there is a code that has not been cracked so far.

Mexican army cipher disk

Mexican army cipher disk belongs to monoalphabetic cipher, it uses two digits to represent one letter. Above picture shows that there are four different cipher rows to compile letter.

For example, if we like to cipher " College", it can be represented to:

17032626192119 or,

64762697196890 etc,

A plaintext letter can be represented by several symbols, but each symbol can only represent one letter. As a result, it is not at high level of security. But I think it is interesting.

MD5

MD5 means Message-Digest Algorithm 5, invented by Ronald L. Rivest. It develops from MD4、MD3、MD2. MD5 is not used for compiling the cipher and making cipher enigmatical.It is a hash arithmetic and is used for prevent to alter the original text by comparing information summary. MD5 ciphered the byte string of any length to a fixed length interger (usually length in 16 to 32 digits). During the cipher process, some data information will be filtrated. Therefore, it is impossible to draw original text by inversely calculate the ciphered text.

For example, if you sign up to a bbs, set the password "qiuyu21". Through the MD5 process, this password will change to"287F1E255D930496EE01037339CS978D". When you click "submit", the server's database will record the calculation result "287F1E255D930496EE01037339CS978D" rather than your original password "qiuyu21". As a result, when you log in the bbs next time, server will still translate your password typed " qiuyu21" to the MD5 calculation result. After checkout, if the result matches the data in database, you can successfully log in.

What is the advantage of MD5? Well, If a hacker breaks the database, he can not use the MD5 result to log in. However, if database record the original password, once a hacker break the database, he or she could get all passwords and log in sucessfully in any other's user name.

MD5 is still in high level of security in nowadays society.

number cipher

I found a new method to compile cipher just using simple numbers.

If we need to cipher 26 letters, the simple way is to transfer the letters to numbers. For example, 1 represent A, 2 represent B and so on. If we want to cipher "number" use binary conversion, it will change to "1110 10101 1101 10 101 10010 1111 1110 101". If we use decimal conversion, the cipher message is "14 21 13 2 5 18 15 14 5"

Besides, we can use reverse to increase difficulty to decipher. For example, the plaintext is "This is a test." If we reverse the whole sentence, the cipher message will be :"tset a si siht." If we reverse every word, the cipher message turns to:"siht si a tset." To improve the cipher, we could also add the number cipher method no matter it is binary conversion or decimal conversion. You can have a try!~

about cipher disk

Because of my carelessness, I lost my cipher disk. As a result, I made a new one. The picture on the left shows my finished product.

During the process I made the cipher disk. I have some suggestions for you if you are interested in making a new one by you own.

Frist, you should use compasses to draw two circles with different diameter.

Second, after you cut the circle, you need to overlay the smaller one on the bigger one snapping to the same center of circle.

Then, you should use rulers with pass through the center of circle and make several lineations with the same angle intervals.

Last, you could find something like clip to connect two disks. Done!

Besides, I found some questions that why Alberti cipher disk does not include the whole 26 letters? Whether we could add another disk to make the cipher reach higher level of security?

The wide use of cryptology

It is widely believed that people focus on keeping privacy secure a lot. As a result, cryptology is popularly used by people no matter in which country or at what time.

Take China as an example, in ancient times, people use flames smoke signals to pass the war news. And then, a people named Gongliang Zeng collected the most common combat situations and compiled them to numbers. Before the General expedited, the general and Military chain of command would reach an agreement about a piece of poem with many words. If something happened in the battle, general would search the combat situations number and choose the word which has the same number in the poem. Then he wrote down the word and sent a soldier to pass the information.

For instance, if the combat situation is numbered 4, so the 4th word in the poem is the key to pass the information.

Cryptology is not far away from us. In recent days, for example, we need to use password plate to open our mailbox in Dickinson College. It maybe a little bit inconvenient, however, it is necessary for us to protect our secret.

Alberti Cipher Disk~

With the accelerated development of the cryptology, a growing number of people knockled down to study to improve the encryption technology.

Due to the disadvantages of monoalphabetic cipher that could be easily deciphered by analyzing the frequency of letters, priority is to create a new cipher with a higher level of security.

Then, came with polyalphabetic cipher.

One of the representative polyalphabetic ciphers machine is Alberti Cipher Disk.

Alberti Cipher Disk was the first simple substitution cipher machine ever made invented by an Indian man, Alberti.

This machine consists of two concentric disks with different letters and numbers on them, and attached by a common pin.

People spin the disk to make various substitution cipher alphabets, which means the same letter can be represented by distinct symbols.

The most crucial decipher key of this technology is the index agreed by cipher sender and intend recipient.

This technology speeded up the time needed to cipher and decipher codes as well as disturbed the analyze of letter frequency.

I try using this method to create a encoded sentences which selected from a song. Hope you can decipher it!

Note: Index=R Some missing letters in the disk is skipped in the encode message.

Encoded message: Y A V Z O K Y G A A S N Z V K F Y P O D B Y S S P S S P S Q M Z G A S A H O L H K Y M Z R F Z C P R X C Z C K X N C.

Look forward for your decipher message!