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Two Centuries On, a Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code
- js2 16y agoSubmission from when this was first published - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=684023 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=684023
- redthrowaway 16y agoSounds like a pretty weak cypher by todays standards. 90 million combinations seems like it would be fairly easy to brute force. Still, it's interesting to see that some of his ideas, like row operations on matrices, are still used in some crypto algos today.
- ceejayoz 16y agoThe article says "90 millions of millions", which is a little larger than 90 million.
- redthrowaway 16y agoYes, but how much longer?
- wladimir 16y agoIndeed, by todays standards it's pretty weak. Then again, 200 years is a long time, and back in the day all the grunt work had to be performed by humans instead of computers. Brute forcing was not a realistic possibility.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Artifex 16y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but it almost sounds like a rudimentary AES-type encryption when they describe how he broke it into a grid and then jumbled the lines. I'm no cryptographer, but the description of this compared to AES encryption seemed remarkably close. That said, using digraph probability to solve it was inspired.
- ars 16y agoIt's interesting how in those days being "simple to learn and memorize" was an important part of a cipher, but not these days.
- rmc 16y agoIt's because all cryptography was done (almost) by hand and most importantly the people trying to break it were only really using metal methods. Nowadays people use computers to break your codes, so your code has to be much more complicated. The only way to do that is with a computer. Codes are an arms race.