History of Cryptography | A Cointelegraph Documentary

We recognize encryption is an essential cybersecurity tool in the hands of the right people. But like any tool, it can be abused.

The Fourth Amendment establishes that under certain circumstances, the public has a legitimate need to gain access to an individual's zone of privacy in pursuit of public safety.

In June last year, the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data act was introduced in the US Senate. Once enforced, the bill would require tech companies to provide access to their encrypted communications service upon request from law enforcement. According to the bill's proponents, unregulated encryption enables crimes such as drug trafficking, child abuse, and terrorism to go undetected.

Some companies want to say to the individual, hey, we can make you invisible to law enforcement, but do we want to live in a society where everyone is invisible to law enforcement?

Still, privacy advocates consider strong encryption a necessary tool to safeguard people's privacy and freedom. Allowing governments to bypass encryption, they say, represents a threat to those fundamental values.

We have a right to have a confidential conversation between the two of us that has nobody else listening into it, in which we have confidence that nobody else is listening into it.

If you have these rights, you have to assert them, otherwise you will lose them.

Public safety and personal privacy both are fundamental aspects of the society we want to live in. How did these two principles find themselves at odds? To understand the roots of this conflict, we need to go back to the origins of cryptographic technology. The need for cryptographically secure communication dates back to ancient times. Emperor Julius Caesar used cryptographic messages to communicate with his generals. The Caesar cipher was one of the earliest cryptographic systems. In this system, each letter in the message is replaced with another one, which is a certain amount of positions down the Alphabet. This certain amount was the key that was needed to decipher each message. If Caesar's enemies retrieved the message without having the key, they would think it was written in some incomprehensible foreign language.

You have your word, let's call it cat. And then what you do is you walk along in the Alphabet, three letters from every existing letter. So if you have the first letter, C, then it will encrypt to C, D, E, F. So you encrypt C to F, A, you would encrypt A, B, C, D, and so on. So that's what the Caesar cipher is. Now, what that's doing is actually adding the key three to every letter.

There are only 26 letters in the Alphabet and therefore only 26 possible keys. That is why today the Caesar cipher is considered among the simplest encryption systems. As it is relatively easy to break. Still, in these early times, cryptography was used by governments as a powerful tool for achieving diplomatic and military goals to ensure the security of the state. But the same technology could also be a threat when in the hands of the enemies of the state. The one example of this was the conflict between Elizabeth Queen of England and Mary Queen of Scots. In the mid 16th century.

Mary Queen of Scots was under arrest in England and was plotting with some other Catholics to overthrow and assassinate Elizabeth. And they were transmitting encrypted messages.

Mary's cipher was a nomenclature in which both letters and words were replaced by special symbols. Eventually, Elizabeth's spies managed to intercept Mary's correspondence and decipher its content, thus discovering the key. The plot was uncovered and Queen Mary sentenced to death. Fast forward to the 20th century. New breakthroughs in cryptographic techniques made them a key tool in modern warfare. During the Second World War, Nazi Germany deployed the Enigma machine, the most sophisticated encryption device at the time. It consisted of a number of rotors which could encrypt messages by scrambling the 26 letters of the Alphabet. The Enigma machine was considered to be unbreakable until British mathematician Alan Turing found a weakness in its implementation. Turing invented the bomb, a decryption machine capable of cracking Enigma.

So this allowed the Allies to win the Battle of the Atlantic, which allowed America to supply the UK with all of the necessary equipment, send all the troops over, and then we have D Day.

Caesar used cryptography to protect the Roman Empire. Queen Mary used it in an attempt to overthrow the English crown. The key role played by cryptography during World War II once more underscored the importance of this technology in matters of national security. During the Cold War, new advancements in this field were jealously kept secret by the competing superpowers of the USSR and the US this led the US to include cryptographic technologies in the United States munitions list, thus classifying it as a weapon. Everything changed in the mid-1970s when cryptographers Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie invented public key cryptography.

My name is Whitfield Diffie and people want to talk to me these days because of some work that I did 47 years ago in the spring of 1975. I am one of the people responsible for the cryptography that makes Internet commerce, however secure it is these days.

In previous cryptographic systems, an encrypted message could be decrypted thanks to the key, which had to be shared between the sender and the receiver via a secure channel that exposed the key to the risk of being compromised. Also, for every communication, a new secret key was needed, which means that this system was not scalable. In public key cryptography, both sender and receiver have two types of keys, One public and one private. The public key, which can be publicly distributed, is used to encrypt the message. The private key is kept secret, and it is used to decrypt the message in combination with the public key. By bypassing the need of sharing a secret key, Public key cryptography solved cryptography scalability issue. For the first time in history, an unlimited amount of people could communicate in a private manner.

I was trying have a totally secure North American telephone system. So you'd have 100 million telephones, say, and anybody should be able to pick up any one of them and call any other one of them, and nobody would be able to listen in.

Now that I've gotten on the Internet, I'd rather be on my computer than doing just about anything. It's really cool. Public key cryptography wouldn't have been so groundbreaking if it wasn't for the app advent of computers and the Internet. These technologies enabled public encrypted communication on a global scale. Cryptography itself became a foundational element of how the Internet works. From e commerce to emails, all sorts of private data exchange on the Internet is now possible, thanks to public key cryptography.

As soon as the Internet comes along, everybody's got a computer, everybody's linking to everybody, everything, everybody's got a mobile phone. We're carrying around cryptography in our pockets, in our bank cards, in our mobile phones, in every single device we have. There's cryptography everywhere.

I saw this as a way to advance liberty and create a new, richer range of interactions between people.

The Internet marks the beginning of the end for the state's control over cryptography. The U.S. national Security Agency tried to limit its dissemination by keeping cryptography under the arms export control act.

NSA acts like a marketing organization and thought of itself as having a monopoly in cryptography. And from the time that we in effect, from its view, challenged that monopoly in the 1970s, it began trying to figure out how to get it. Back.

In the late 80s, a group of cryptographers, engineers, and privacy advocates called cypherpunks started opposing governments attempts to limit cryptography. This confrontation became known as the crypto wars. Cypherpunks believes cryptography was an instrument for citizens to achieve individual privacy and protect themselves from government surveillance. One of the cypherpunks, Professor Adam Back, started writing cryptographic code on t shirts as a Way to protest against the cryptography export ban.

And so they were T shirts, they were tattoos. People were using it as a signature at the bottom of their email saying this is not exportable. Of course they're exporting it while they do it.

Towards the end of the 90s, most restrictions on the usage of strong cryptography were eventually removed. This was the result of the common pressure from privacy advocates and businesses whose interests were harmed by the restrictions. But that wasn't the final goal of the cypherpunks. They were trying to use cryptographic technology to create an anonymous form of digital money that could be exchanged in a peer to peer way. Over a decade later, this cryptographic money became known as cryptocurrency. The advent of Bitcoin gave a new impulse to the cause of privacy advocates. They saw in this technology a tool for finally achieving financial freedom.

Every few years there's a big explosion of interest in cryptography. And the cryptocurrencies I think have mediated the most recent such explosion of interest.

Indeed, concerns over privacy issues exploded into the global spotlight in recent years. In 2013, CIA employee Edward Snowden revealed the existence of a mass surveillance program run by the U.S. national Security Agency. Millions of U.S. citizens. Telephone calls were recorded and gathered in large databases.

There were suspicious people who thought something like that could be happening. But it was actually much worse than the average person expected.

Snowden's revelation sparked a renewed demand for privacy focused technology. Tech companies started implementing end to end encryption in their messaging services and mobile devices. In end to end encrypted communication, content is accessible only by the parties involved. Not even the service provider can access it. As the main providers of public encryption, tech companies quickly ended up at the center of government scrutiny. In 2016, the FBI asked Apple to create a special software or a backdoor into its products. This would enable them to break into an encrypted phone belonging to the shooter who killed 14 people in San Bernardino the year earlier. On that occasion, Apple declined to comply with the authority's request. Such a backdoor into strong encryption would allow law enforcement to access users private data upon the issuance of a warrant. But security analysts agree that once an access method is created, the security of the whole encryption system would be compromised. Also, while a backdoor could be used fairly in democratic societies, what would prevent authoritarian regimes from abusing it?

We've got a backdoor. We can look at our political opponents, emails. We can look at our political opponents. What stops us doing this? As soon as you have a way to abuse power, people Abuse power.

The San Bernardino case raised a few crucial questions. Should tech companies be held responsible if their encryption tools are used for malevolent purposes? What if people's lives are put at risk because of impenetrable encryption?

In a hostage situation, in a kidnap situation, in a trafficking situation, in a terrorist situation? The potential loss of life in a situation of the type I've described could be attributable to these companies. Encryption? Yes, absolutely. If indeed, as a result of Apple's encryption of a device, someone dies, are you willing to accept Apple liability for that death?

Senator, As a software engineer, my focus.

Is on trying to provide the strongest security for all of our users and protect them in all cases.

Proponents of a backdoor into encryption point out that individual privacy is not an absolute right and that in certain cases, limiting this right is necessary to protect society as a whole.

If the choice is between a world where we can achieve a 99% assurance against cyber threats for the typical consumer while still providing law enforcement 80% of the access it needs to protect society, or a world where we have boosted our cybersecurity to 99.5%, but at a cost of reducing law enforcement's access to zero, the choice for society should be clear.

However, many believe that giving government access to popular encrypted messaging services would not achieve the intended purpose of preventing crime. It would just cause bad actors to switch to other encrypted tools which are nowadays widely accessible.

So all you've done is put a backdoor in for legitimate users and you've actually made it worse for yourself because now you, you don't know what system the criminals are using because they've gone off and developed their own. Because this is easy stuff to do.

By outlawing cryptography, by outlawing truly secure cryptography, what we mean, you know this. It gets us back to that sort of dreadful old line. Guns are outlawed. Only outlaws will have guns.

A final agreement between civil society and governments on encryption is still far from being reached. On one side, increasingly sophisticated cryptographic tools will enable higher degrees of privacy. On the other hand, governments will seek to regulate and limit their use. Should individual privacy rights be limited for the sake of the common good? And if so, where should the line be drawn? What sides should tech companies take in this debate? And most importantly, what side is, if any, should you take? If you enjoyed this Cointelegraph documentary, share it with your friends and people you trust. The voices of the individual need to be heard.