List of cryptographers

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This is a list of cryptographers. Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties called adversaries.

Contents

Pre twentieth century

World War I and World War II wartime cryptographers

Other pre-computer

Modern

See also: Category:Modern cryptographers for a more exhaustive list.

Symmetric-key algorithm inventors

Asymmetric-key algorithm inventors

Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman, Ronald Rivest, and Adi Shamir at RSA 2008 Cryptographers-2008.jpg
Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman, Ronald Rivest, and Adi Shamir at RSA 2008

Cryptanalysts

Algorithmic number theorists

Theoreticians

Government cryptographers

Cryptographer businesspeople

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cryptanalysis</span> Study of analyzing information systems in order to discover their hidden aspects

Cryptanalysis refers to the process of analyzing information systems in order to understand hidden aspects of the systems. Cryptanalysis is used to breach cryptographic security systems and gain access to the contents of encrypted messages, even if the cryptographic key is unknown.

A chosen-plaintext attack (CPA) is an attack model for cryptanalysis which presumes that the attacker can obtain the ciphertexts for arbitrary plaintexts. The goal of the attack is to gain information that reduces the security of the encryption scheme.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William F. Friedman</span> American cryptologist (1891–1969)

William Frederick Friedman was a US Army cryptographer who ran the research division of the Army's Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) in the 1930s, and parts of its follow-on services into the 1950s. In 1940, subordinates of his led by Frank Rowlett broke Japan's PURPLE cipher, thus disclosing Japanese diplomatic secrets before America's entrance into World War II.

Articles related to cryptography include:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henryk Zygalski</span>

Henryk Zygalski was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who worked at breaking German Enigma-machine ciphers before and during World War II.

Cryptography, the use of codes and ciphers to protect secrets, began thousands of years ago. Until recent decades, it has been the story of what might be called classical cryptography — that is, of methods of encryption that use pen and paper, or perhaps simple mechanical aids. In the early 20th century, the invention of complex mechanical and electromechanical machines, such as the Enigma rotor machine, provided more sophisticated and efficient means of encryption; and the subsequent introduction of electronics and computing has allowed elaborate schemes of still greater complexity, most of which are entirely unsuited to pen and paper.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Tiltman</span> British cryptographer

Brigadier John Hessell Tiltman, was a British Army officer who worked in intelligence, often at or with the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) starting in the 1920s. His intelligence work was largely connected with cryptography, and he showed exceptional skill at cryptanalysis. His work in association with Bill Tutte on the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, the German teleprinter cipher, called "Tunny" at Bletchley Park, led to breakthroughs in attack methods on the code, without a computer. It was to exploit those methods, at extremely high speed with great reliability, that Colossus, the first digital programmable electronic computer, was designed and built.

The Cipher Bureau was the interwar Polish General Staff's Second Department's unit charged with SIGINT and both cryptography and cryptanalysis.

Cryptography was used extensively during World War II because of the importance of radio communication and the ease of radio interception. The nations involved fielded a plethora of code and cipher systems, many of the latter using rotor machines. As a result, the theoretical and practical aspects of cryptanalysis, or codebreaking, were much advanced.

Alfred Dillwyn "Dilly" Knox, CMG was a British classics scholar and papyrologist at King's College, Cambridge and a codebreaker. As a member of the Room 40 codebreaking unit he helped decrypt the Zimmermann Telegram which brought the USA into the First World War. He then joined the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS).

Peter Frank George Twinn was a British mathematician, Second World War codebreaker and entomologist. The first professional mathematician to be recruited to GC&CS. Head of ISK from 1943, the unit responsible for decrypting over 100,000 Abwehr communications.

<i>Enigma</i> (2001 film) 2001 film directed by Michael Apted

Enigma is a 2001 espionage thriller film directed by Michael Apted from a screenplay by Tom Stoppard. The script was adapted from the 1995 novel Enigma by Robert Harris, about the Enigma codebreakers of Bletchley Park in the Second World War.

Commander Alexander "Alastair" Guthrie Denniston was a Scottish codebreaker in Room 40, deputy head of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) and hockey player. Denniston was appointed operational head of GC&CS in 1919 and remained so until February 1942.

In cryptanalysis, attack models or attack types are a classification of cryptographic attacks specifying the kind of access a cryptanalyst has to a system under attack when attempting to "break" an encrypted message generated by the system. The greater the access the cryptanalyst has to the system, the more useful information they can get to utilize for breaking the cypher.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cryptography</span> Practice and study of secure communication techniques

Cryptography, or cryptology, is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More generally, cryptography is about constructing and analyzing protocols that prevent third parties or the public from reading private messages. Modern cryptography exists at the intersection of the disciplines of mathematics, computer science, information security, electrical engineering, digital signal processing, physics, and others. Core concepts related to information security are also central to cryptography. Practical applications of cryptography include electronic commerce, chip-based payment cards, digital currencies, computer passwords, and military communications.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to cryptography:

The Cipher Department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht was the Signal Intelligence Agency of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces of the German Armed Forces before and during World War II. OKW/Chi, within the formal order of battle hierarchy OKW/WFsT/Ag WNV/Chi, dealt with the cryptanalysis and deciphering of enemy and neutral states' message traffic and security control of its own key processes and machinery, such as the rotor cipher ENIGMA machine. It was the successor to the former Chi bureau of the Reichswehr Ministry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erich Hüttenhain</span>

Erich Hüttenhain was a German academic mathematician and cryptographer (Cryptography) and considered a leading cryptanalyst in the Third Reich. He was Head of the cryptanalysis unit at OKW/Chi, the Cipher Department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">German Army cryptographic systems of World War II</span>

German Army cryptographic systems of World War II were based on the use of three types of cryptographic machines that were used to encrypt communications between units at the division level. These were the Enigma machine, the teleprinter cipher attachment, and the cipher teleprinter the Siemens and Halske T52,. All were considered insecure.

References

  1. Whitman and Mattord (2010). Principles of Information Security (4th ed.). Course Technology. p. 351. ISBN   978-1111138219.
  2. David Salomon. Coding for Data and Computer Communications. Springer, 2005.
  3. Fred A. Stahl. "A homophonic cipher for computational cryptography" Proceedings of the national computer conference and exposition (AFIPS '73), pp. 123–126, New York City, 1973.
  4. Worrall, Simon (7 October 2017). "This Woman Saved the Americas From the Nazis". National Geographic. Archived from the original on 7 October 2017. Retrieved 1 April 2018.