The first British secret agent called 007 called it the most precious juell [jewel] that I have yet of other mens travailes recovered, a book he had managed to buy despite others offering a Thowsand Crownes for it. This same text was denounced by the ecclesiastical authorities of the late 15th century as a work of demon magic, who immediately placed it on the Vatican’s Index of Prohibited Books, where it would remain for 200 years. What links this mysterious secret work of the late Middle Ages, the identity of the true author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare, the cracking of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Purple cipher during WWII, electronic commerce, the politics of strong encryption technology and government policy, and proto-rappers The Sugarhill Gang? The answer is a fairly obscure German monk called Johannes Trithemius, with the work in question being his Steganographia, a manuscript copy of which agent of Queen Elizabeth I and alchemist John Dee, who really was referred to as 007 in coded diplomatic correspondence, snapped up in Amsterdam a half century after Trithemius’ death in December 1516. The Steganographia led to a simplified spin-off called the Polygraphia, a work which included such crypto firsts as the first polyalphabetic table and the concept of a progressive key, a text which all in all can be held as the first ever published writings on the totally new field of cryptography.

By Gary Flood

Four and a half centuries later, we find ourselves whimpering in a certain amount of pain in the slightly musty splendor of San Francisco’s Masonic Hall (quite an appropriate place for a conference about secrets!) as the Sugarhill boys from Noo Yawk join RSA Data Security Inc, president of eleven years Jim Bizdos on stage to regale the 3,000-plus delegates at the 1998 RSA Security conference with a, er, fairly unlikely dance floor hit, the Crypto Rap: I like to hip hip hop/I like to online shop/I trust RSA/To keep the hackers at bay, etc. Trithemius must take some of the blame for this tongue-in-cheek production, but we’ll forgive him. After all, to be a cryptanalyst requires some highly admirable qualities: according to a 1563 description of what such an individual requires, we find that they must be practiced in mathematics, warm in spirit, lacking in negligence, familiar with military tactics, fluent in many languages, and rarely be affected by fatigue. If there are any true modern successors to Trithemius, they were all sheltering from the rains last week in the 1998 RSA Conference, which has gone from 60 math/hacking geeks seven years ago to all the suits (and sandals) of the latest version.

Victorian-style think tank in Illinois

Worthy successors to the fascination with secret writing in our culture – which led to all that fuss about it being Francis Bacon being the real author of Hamlet (due to alleged mysterious marks in one of the early, authentic Folios), which in turn led to a retired garment manufacturer called George Fabyan assembling a Victorian-style think tank in Illinois to thrash out the idea, one of whose participants, William Friedman, became so disgusted with the idiocy of the whole project that he left to become the father of US signal intelligence and military code breaking operations, which was kind of handy since he led the effort to break Purple, which in turn meant Admiral Nimitz had the goods on the Japanese in time for the Battle of Midway in June 1942. The connections in crypto go up and down and sideways in appropriately hidden and surprising ways: there aren’t many IT conferences that would have invited a Ph.D. philosophy candidate from the State University of New York at Binghampton called Steven DeCaroli to give such an extensive overview of some of these peculiar and interesting links. (And DeCaroli isn’t the only one – legendary American cryptographer Whitfield Diffie, and current employee of Sun Microsystems Inc, startled the conference by mentioning a paper at the web site of the UK’s signal intelligence headquarters GCHQ, which seems to suggest the Brits invented, if not exploited, the whole idea of public key cryptography way back in the 1970s!) But fascinating as all this is, why has cryptography become such a hot topic? This shows that research in pure mathematics can change the world, was a comment from MIT researcher Shafira Goldwasser; but it’s the application that has made that statement true. The answer is of course the internet, which has spawned the idea of the practical application of what had been strictly military technology to the commercial world. People are still prepared to offer a Thowsand Crownes in today’s money to those who can provide the right kind of secret writing for today’s invisible commerce. Hence the interest in such wildly esoteric mathematical concepts as elliptic curves and suchlike, which are the next hot topic in crypto technology after the RSA and DES algorithms themselves. And also hence the interest of companies like IBM and Intel, which are rushing around trying to lay as much groundwork in standardizing emerging e-commerce and crypto-dependent frameworks and products (of which more tomorrow). Though of Microsoft, we can only say that its workings in this field can only fairly be described as occult – in its literal sense of meaning unseen, as they were conspicuous by their absence. (To be continued – but only using your private and public keys…)

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