Paste your essay in here…The computer is now part of our daily commodities. What is the story behind the the machine we use for so many essential tasks? Computers come into every aspect of modern life, but the meaning of the word ‘computer’ has changed in time. In the 1930s and 1940s ‘a computer’ meant a person doing calculations, while to indicate a machine doing calculations one would refer to an ‘automatic computer’. Nowadays, it is better to reserve the word ‘computer’ for the type of machine which has swept everything else away in its path: the digital computer.
This research paper discusses how the development of cryptology led to the invention of the computer and set the basis for modern day’s digital era. Topics that will be addressed include the origin, development, and cultural impact of cryptology. More specifically, to trail the story of the computer two questions must be asked. Firstly, what inventions and techniques of cryptology proposed by whom contributed to the invention of the computer. And secondly, what event could be counted as the source for the beginning of the digital era? To answer the first point, it was Alan Turing who first developed the principle of the Universal Machine and its practicability for implementation in electronics. Regarding the second question, World War II played a crucial role as the blasting fuse that boosted the practical and theoretical development of modern cryptology. Technology developed during the war made it so that by WWII, there were unbreakable codes and by the end, there was technology to break them. In the Big-Data Era now, cryptography continues to play an important role both in practical and theoretical aspects.
The story of digital computers starts with cryptology: the art and science of secret communication. Cryptology is a science regarding communicating/conveying and storing data in secure and secret form. The term cryptology derives from the greek word “kryptos” mich means “hidden” and “logos” meaning “word”. INTRODUCE SENTENCE The transformation of text results in an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption called a cipher. The operation of a cipher depends on a key, a piece of auxiliary information available only to legitimate users who operate it to transform the hidden information. The encrypting procedure is varied depending on such key, which changes the detailed operation of the algorithm. A key must be selected before using a cipher to encrypt a message. Without knowledge of the key, it should be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to decrypt the resulting ciphertext into readable plaintext.
Cryptology includes cryptography, the study of rules and techniques of cryptology. The term cryptography originates from the Greek “kryptos” and “graphein” which means “to write”. During times of war cryptography was mainly referred to hiding written messages, while now it extends to securing data flows between computers, verifying identity of users of e-commerce, and many more practical uses.
Cryptanalysis also falls within the cryptology umbrella. The word cryptanalysis originates also from the Greek word “kryptos” and “analýein” meaning “to untie”. Cryptanalysis is the science of creating cryptographically secret information without knowledge of the key.
Cryptology was first used to secure written messages the source of information is called the plaintext even if is a binary stream of 1s and 0s, as often seen in computer outputs. So encryption is the transformation or substitution of a part of the plaintext under the control of a key. Decryption is the inverse operation when a legitimate user identifies the hidden information from the cipher using a key. Usually code and cipher are confused, but they have very different meaning. A code is a constant rule which replaces an information such as the Morse code or an acronym. A cipher also substitutes a piece of information but the replacement is determined by a rule defined by a concealed key known only to the transmitter and the receiver so that any other party will not be able to decrypt the cipher. Nowadays very often a data is both encoded and encrypted and most of the times the keys that will decrypt those data are one time keys so that they can be mathematically proved to be crypto secure.
INTRODUCE BETTER FOR FLOW Continuing with the story of the computer, it was the British mathematician Alan Mathison Turing who revolutionized cryptology through the invention of greatly impacting machines. Turing was born June 23, 1912 in London, and has been one of the most important mathematicians in the 20th century, he studied logic, philosophy and cryptanalysis. After having studied at King’s College, he entered the University of Cambridge to study mathematics in 1931. After his graduation in 1934, he received a fellowship for his research in probability theory at King’s College. In 1936 he publishes a seminal paper: “On computable Numbers, with an application to the decision problem.” That same year he moved to Princeton for his PHD in mathematical logic, completed in 1938. The Church-Turing thesis was the
which claims that everything humanly computable can also be computed by the Universal Turing machine, a code breaker machine. This claim also enlightened the fact that human computation have limits. After his studies Turing will join the British government cryptological headquarters at Bletchley Park where he will work with a team of other mathematicians on the construction of a code-breaking machine called the Turing Bombe to decrypt the German code making machine Enigma. However, the Germans’ encrypted messages evolved with a new machine called Tunny which substituted Enigma. To counteract German Enigma Turing constructed the Colossus, the first electronic computer, fundamental to the fight against German encryption for written messages during the World War II. When the war was over, Turing continued to work at the construction of an electronic stored-program digital computer at the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory. Turing was a pioneer in artificial intelligence, he asserted that the brain was working in a similar way as a digital computing machine. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1951 and in 1952, he was convicted for homosexuality, considered a crime in Great Britain at that time. Turing was obliged to take an hormone therapy for 12 months which was the beginning of his decline. He was found dead in his bed in 1954 and is suspected to have taken his own life. In 2009 British prime Minister Gordon brown publicly apologized for Turing’s prosecution for being gay.
, and his struggle for living in a society which considered him being gay a crime.
During World War II the Ultra project, an allied intelligence, was seeking to decrypt the German coded written messages. Chiefed by the mathematician Alan Turing and based in the British government’s establishment of Bletchley Park, it was just a small group of code breakers trying to decode the messages of the Enigma in a project that is deemed to have contributed to the Allied victory in World War II. The German Enigma cipher machine was a complex device whose encrypted messages were impressively hard to decrypt. The Ultra project, was inspired by various machines, one in particular: the Polish Bombe, constructed by Marian Rejewski. This code breaking machine decrypted Enigma messages taking advantage of leakage of picture of the German Enigma’s operating manual. Nevertheless, the Germans realized this and significantly changed the structure of their machine, causing Rejewski’s machine to be useless. In 1941, after many versions and edits, Turing’s machine finally succeeded to decrypt the German messages. At this point the German opposition realised that the high-speed Bombes were creating problems, so they created a new encryption machine called Tunny. Against it, the original Bombe, was of no use, so the Allies had to build something able to decrypt the new German ciphers more quickly: the Colossus. In 1944, this machine was the first large scale electronic computer which went into operations in Bletchley Park. The Colossus attack on Tunny has been denied by the British government until the year 2000 when this secret and the importance of the work of Alan Turing’s anti-Enigma Bombe was revealed to the world.
BOMBE!
Colossus was the first large scale electronic computer that went into operation in 1944; it followed the Turing Bombe machine that became useless once the Germans manufactured the cipher machine Tunny that was sending messages in binary code. Tunny encrypted the messages by Hitler and his high command (so the most harmful messages) by changing every letter or character into a 5-bit teleprinter code and masking the coded message blending it with other letters so that it looked very random. In 1942, the British code breaker William Tutte identified the pattern in which the messages were produced by Tunny’s electrical circuits. Using Tunny’s discovery Alan Turing found a method to decrypt of Tunny’s ciphers by hand. For many months this was the only method to fight the German encryption. Colossus I was built to help and speed up the process. Colossus was a high speed analytic machine necessary to eliminate a number of possible encryption, after that the hand code breakers would have continued the work to clear out the Germen message. Colossus was using photoelectric technology to read two punched tapes at a time, one tape contained the encrypted text and the other the possible keys. Initially it was challenging to run the two tapes simultaneously at high speed, but with several corrections Colossus became faster and more reliable. The Colossus was indispensable to discover information regarding position of armies and their intentions. It was also fundamental for the interception of encrypted messages during the D-day in Normandy saving thousands of lives and contributing to the Allies’ success in World War II.