Conservapedia - User contributions [en]

Cryptography

2008-02-05T00:22:04Z

ChazzaP:

Cryptography is the writing of secrets. The word 'cryptography' comes from the Greek 'cryptos', secret, and 'graphos', writing.

All of cryptography (debatable since the dawn of quantum cryptography) can be described as one of two methods.

== Codes ==

Codes are, in their simplest terms, replacing words and phrases in a message with other words and phrases whose meaning is known to the recipient. For example:

Take the phrase: "The bombers require a fighter escort at Newcastle, 2300 hours"

There are many ways to encode this. Some appropriate rules must be created and shared with the recipient. Because to anyone who intercepts the message, something that sounds like a code could arouse their suspicions, causing the message to be "cracked" (decoded) or to be destroyed or otherwise delayed. Therefore it is wise to create a code that produces innocent sounding messages:

:11.00pm, Newcastle: Mother birds look for duckling flock

The above message simply substitutes "mother bird" for bomber, "duckling" for fighter and "flock" for escort. The message could now be transmitted, and if intercepted could easily be mistaken for a diary entry of a birdwatcher.

Codes also include methods of hiding a message within a seemingly normal message (used frequently by POW's). A famous example of this is the [http://www.flickr.com/photos/8443340@N06/sets/72157600242068267/ September 1992 edition of Autocar]

James May amused himself while compiling a top 100 list of the cars that year arranged the capitalised letters across many pages to spell out "So, you think it's really good yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up. It's a real pain in the arse" (punctuation and spaces added for clarity)

Of course there is a very obvious problem with codes, find out the rules governing what is substituted for what and an intercepted message can be read easily. And in order to produce any useful codesets, large "dictionaries" were required by both sender and reciever.

== Ciphers ==

Cipher: a method of changing the plaintext (normal written word) into ciphertext and back again.

A cipher can be as simple, or as complex, as the user requires. For the most part (see RSA later for exception) ciphers require both a rule and a key. The key is used by the recipient of the message to turn the ciphertext back into plaintext using the reverse of the rule.

'''Some examples of ciphers:'''

:Plaintext: "HELLO WORLD"

Even without substituting letters as commonly done in ciphers, by reflecting the message, words, or blocks of letters it is possible to make it difficult to decrypt the message without knowing the rule, even for computers. Note that processes like this are not commutative.

:Word Reversal: "OLLEH DLROW"

:Message Reversal: "DLROW OLLEH"

:3-Letter block reversal: "LEH OLROWDL"

Using a cipher historically attributed to Julius Caeser, wherein the letters are moved along in the alphabet by the number of letters represented by the key (note Z+1 = A). This example uses a key of 1

:Caeser: "IFMMP XPSME"

However this cipher can be easily broken by modern computers as it uses a 1:1 alphabet substitution. It can be made more secure by encrypting each letter with a different key. In this example the letter key will be its position in the text.

:Letter Key Caeser: "IGOPT DWAVO"

Note that although O appears twice in the ciphertext, the first time it represents an L, the second time a D, making this a much harder cipher to break.

== Historical Uses Of Cryptography ==

Generally speaking, cryptography has been the sole domain of governments. All governments of the world have a branch dedicated to the interception and decryption of encoded information. In America, this is the CIA; in Britain, it's MI5; in Vatican City it's Iscariot (Vatican Section XIII).

Cryptography has played a large part in many wars. In the first world war, Mata Hari was responsible for carrying messages back and forth for the German government, causing the deaths of thousands of French soldiers.{{fact}} In the second world war, British soldiers captured the crew and The Enigma Engine of German U-boat U-571, leading to the decryption of Nazi communications and the end of the war.

Other examples of the importance of cryptography include Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.

[[Ethel Rosenberg]] and [[Julius Rosenberg]] sold US atomic secrets to the USSR at the height of the cold war. They were convicted and executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison.

== Modern Uses Of Cryptography ==

Currently the most common form of cryptography is public key encryption. This relies on the fact that it takes significantly (order 108 times) longer to find two prime factors of 1000 or more digit numbers than it does to multiply the numbers together to create the 1000 digit number in the first place.

In this system there are two keys, the first is the "private key", which only the '''recipient''' knows. The second is the "public key" which can be sent freely to anyone, allowing them to encrypt messages with it such that only the owner of the private key can decrypt them. These public keys are calculated from the private keys, but as they are often over 1000 digits long and would take many decades to calculate the private key from them (RSA, the most commonly used encryption protocol uses 2048 digit numbers which would take over 4000 years to crack with a desktop computer)

This technology is put to use mostly on the internet. It allows sensitive data, eg. credit card numbers, phone numbers, social security numbers etc. to be transmitted without fear of interception and use by malevolent third parties. All internet banking and shopping uses this technology (whenever you see "https://" instead of "http://" in the address bar a public key algorithm is in use, most likely RSA"

[[category:information technology]]

Cryptography

2008-02-05T00:21:32Z

ChazzaP: added distinction between codes and ciphers, examples and definitions of each. added details of modern use of cryptography

Cryptography is the writing of secrets. The word 'cryptography' comes from the Greek 'cryptos', secret, and 'graphos', writing.

All of cryptography (debatable since the dawn of quantum cryptography) can be described as one of two methods.

== Codes ==

Codes are, in their simplest terms, replacing words and phrases in a message with other words and phrases whose meaning is known to the recipient. For example:

Take the phrase: "The bombers require a fighter escort at Newcastle, 2300 hours"

There are many ways to encode this. Some appropriate rules must be created and shared with the recipient. Because to anyone who intercepts the message, something that sounds like a code could arouse their suspicions, causing the message to be "cracked" (decoded) or to be destroyed or otherwise delayed. Therefore it is wise to create a code that produces innocent sounding messages:

:11.00pm, Newcastle: Mother birds look for duckling flock

The above message simply substitutes "mother bird" for bomber, "duckling" for fighter and "flock" for escort. The message could now be transmitted, and if intercepted could easily be mistaken for a diary entry of a birdwatcher.

Codes also include methods of hiding a message within a seemingly normal message (used frequently by POW's). A famous example of this is the [http://www.flickr.com/photos/8443340@N06/sets/72157600242068267/ September 1992 edition of Autocar]

James May amused himself while compiling a top 100 list of the cars that year arranged the capitalised letters across many pages to spell out "So, you think it's really good yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up. It's a real pain in the arse" (punctuation and spaces added for clarity)

Of course there is a very obvious problem with codes, find out the rules governing what is substituted for what and an intercepted message can be read easily. And in order to produce any useful codesets, large "dictionaries" were required by both sender and reciever.

== Ciphers ==

Cipher: a method of changing the plaintext (normal written word) into ciphertext and back again.

A cipher can be as simple, or as complex, as the user requires. For the most part (see RSA later for exception) ciphers require both a rule and a key. The key is used by the recipient of the message to turn the ciphertext back into plaintext using the reverse of the rule.

'''Some examples of ciphers:'''

:Plaintext: "HELLO WORLD"

Even without substituting letters as commonly done in ciphers, by reflecting the message, words, or blocks of letters it is possible to make it difficult to decrypt the message without knowing the rule, even for computers. Note that processes like this are not commutative.

:Word Reversal: "OLLEH DLROW"

:Message Reversal: "DLROW OLLEH"

:3-Letter block reversal: "LEH OLROWDL"

Using a cipher historically attributed to Julius Caeser, wherein the letters are moved along in the alphabet by the number of letters represented by the key (note Z+1 = A). This example uses a key of 1

:Caeser: "IFMMP XPSME"

However this cipher can be easily broken by modern computers as it uses a 1:1 alphabet substitution. It can be made more secure by encrypting each letter with a different key. In this example the letter key will be its position in the text.

:Letter Key Caeser: "IGOPT DWAVO"

Note that although O appears twice in the ciphertext, the first time it represents an L, the second time a D, making this a much harder cipher to break.

== Historical Uses Of Cryptography ==

Generally speaking, cryptography has been the sole domain of governments. All governments of the world have a branch dedicated to the interception and decryption of encoded information. In America, this is the CIA; in Britain, it's MI5; in Vatican City it's Iscariot (Vatican Section XIII).

Cryptography has played a large part in many wars. In the first world war, Mata Hari was responsible for carrying messages back and forth for the German government, causing the deaths of thousands of French soldiers.{{fact}} In the second world war, British soldiers captured the crew and The Enigma Engine of German U-boat U-571, leading to the decryption of Nazi communications and the end of the war.

Other examples of the importance of cryptography include Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.

[[Ethel Rosenberg]] and [[Julius Rosenberg]] sold US atomic secrets to the USSR at the height of the cold war. They were convicted and executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison.

== Modern Uses Of Cryptography ==

Currently the most common form of cryptography is public key encryption. This relies on the fact that it takes significantly (order 108 times) longer to find two prime factors of 200 or more digit numbers than it does to multiply the numbers together to create the 1000 digit number in the first place.

In this system there are two keys, the first is the "private key", which only the '''recipient''' knows. The second is the "public key" which can be sent freely to anyone, allowing them to encrypt messages with it such that only the owner of the private key can decrypt them. These public keys are calculated from the private keys, but as they are often over 1000 digits long and would take many decades to calculate the private key from them (RSA, the most commonly used encryption protocol uses 2048 digit numbers which would take over 4000 years to crack with a desktop computer)

This technology is put to use mostly on the internet. It allows sensitive data, eg. credit card numbers, phone numbers, social security numbers etc. to be transmitted without fear of interception and use by malevolent third parties. All internet banking and shopping uses this technology (whenever you see "https://" instead of "http://" in the address bar a public key algorithm is in use, most likely RSA"

[[category:information technology]]

User:ChazzaP

2008-02-04T14:08:30Z

ChazzaP:

Born: England October 31st 1989 
Education: St Pauls School, London 
Qualifications: Very high scores in A-level (English school leaving examinations) Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Computing 
Religion: Christian

User talk:ChazzaP

2008-02-04T14:03:52Z

ChazzaP:

Personally I am struggling with the institutionalised hatred of this wiki against wikipedia.
What many people seem to confuse is the viewpoints of the users who edit wikipedia, and the viewpoint of wikipedia as an institution. As an institution wikipedia has a NPOV, but its users vary in viewpoint from fascist through to communist and everything in between.

The claim that wikipedia is "6 times more liberal" than the population of the United States is interesting. But this must be looked at in context: Wikipedia has over 6 million registered users of which a large proportion are American. From this we can deduce that a significant amount of the liberal viewpoints on wikipedia are from a member of the american populace. Or if you would dispute this then you must accept that a member rest of the world outside of the United States is many times more liberal than an equivalent american. Speaking as a member of the outside world, I would disagree with this.

The number of admins on wikipedia has also been brought up as a point of attack. However by conservapedias own statistics 0.16% of its members are administrators, the corresponding figure for wikipedia is 0.02%. In addition to this, we can look at the number of pages per admin, for conservapedia the figue is 1767, for wikipedia this figue is some 300 lower at 1489.

Anyway, just a couple of thoughts from me, some more will come at some point. I doubt anyone will read this but hey, miracles happen..

:A more relevant statistic would be users who contribute frequently. Over half the activity at Wikipedia is done by less than 1,000 users. How many of these are admins? --[[User:Ed Poor|Ed Poor]] [[User talk:Ed Poor|Talk]] 21:46, 2 February 2008 (EST)

Due to a combination of wikipedia statistics and microsoft excel I can answer this query. It appears to be a myth that "Over half the activity at Wikipedia is done by less than 1,000 users". 
From the statistics page on wikipedia (which I am not permitted to link to by the commandments) I copied the data for the top 2,500 editors of wikipedia, and using excel I summed the total number of edits by these users (48,250,772 if anyone feels like veryifying) and from this it is simple to calculate the percentage of the total edits (198,579,922) that this represents. The result is 24.3% which is significantly less than half for significantly more than 1000 users. Incidently, for the top 1000 users, this figure is 15.4%. --[[User:ChazzaP|ChazzaP]] 09:03, 4 February 2008 (EST)

User:ChazzaP

2008-02-03T23:02:34Z

ChazzaP:

Born: England October 31st 1989 
Education: St Pauls School, London 
Religion: Christian

User:ChazzaP

2008-02-03T23:01:47Z

ChazzaP: New page: Born: England October 31st 1989 Education: St Pauls School, London Religion: Christian

Born: England October 31st 1989
Education: St Pauls School, London
Religion: Christian

Talk:Cryptography

2008-02-03T22:59:28Z

ChazzaP:

Should the Rosenbergs be on this page? They sold secrets, but not codes, to the Russians. [[User:Maestro|Maestro]] 12:25, 3 February 2008 (EST)

There should be mention of the historical uses of cryptography by the romans and early christians.
Also mention of modern cryptography under the guise of encryption allowing secure internet transfers including all credit card and personal data.
i will work on a major edit for this page, probably post it tomorrow evening --[[User:ChazzaP|ChazzaP]] 17:59, 3 February 2008 (EST)

Talk:Cryptography

2008-02-03T22:59:07Z

ChazzaP:

User talk:ChazzaP

2008-02-03T01:40:39Z

ChazzaP: New page: Personally I am struggling with the institutionalised hatred of this wiki against wikipedia. What many people seem to confuse is the viewpoints of the users who edit wikipedia, and the vie...

Cryptography

2008-02-02T20:06:11Z

ChazzaP:

Cryptography is the writing of secrets. The word 'cryptography' comes from the Greek 'cryptos', secret, and 'graphos', writing.

== Examples Of Cryptography ==

Cryptography is probably as old as mankind (only about 6000 years). From the very beginnning of time, people have needed to keep secrets from one another. Generally, 'cryptography' refers to ''encoding'', which is the process of taking plain text (like this) and making it difficult (or impossible) to understand.

One of the oldest and easiest ''cyphers'' (a pair of keys used for encryption and decryption) is the substitution cypher. To use this cypher, simply write out the alphebet and then write the numbers from 1 to 26 under each letter, so that A = 1, B = 2, C = 3, etc. Thus, 'Conservapedia' becomes '3 15 14 19 5 22 1 16 5 4 9 1'. Another easy substitution cypher is to write out the alphabet from A to Z and then write the alphabet again underneath, this time from Z to A. In this cypher, A = Z, B = Y, C = X, and so on. Using this cypher, 'Conservapedia' becomes 'x l m h v i e z k v w r z'.

To make things a little more difficult for anyone that intercepts the message, one can string the numbers or letters together in one solid lump. For example, here we have the sentence 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog'. In a simple numerical substitution cypher (with slashes to separate words), it looks like this:

<blockquote>
20 8 5 / 17 21 9 3 11 / 2 17 15 24 14 / 6 15 24 / 10 21 13 16 19 / 15 22 5 18 / 20 8 5 / 12 1 26 25 / 4 15 7
</blockquote>

Now, if we remove the slashes and spaces, we get this:

<blockquote>
2085172193112171524146152410211316191522518208512126254157
</blockquote>

It still says the same thing, but it's far more difficult to decipher. To make it even more difficult to decipher, we can put spaces back into the string of numbers -- at random, like so:

<blockquote>
20851 721 931121 7152 4146 152 410211 31619 15 2251 820851 212 625 4157.
</blockquote>

This is a fairly strong cipher, provided that you're only working with a pencil and a piece of paper. With the advent of computers, this sort of encryption is little better than writing your message on a paper napkin and folding it in half.

Computer programs can easily break this cypher using "brute force". The encrypted information is input into the program, which is then set into motion. The program tries every combination of letters, dumping the results into a file. The file is then reviewed by the person that put the information into the program (this person is usually a criminal, known as a "hacker").

== Historical Uses Of Cryptography ==

Generally speaking, cryptography has been the sole domain of governments, which is as it should be. All governments of the world have a branch dedicated to the interception and decryption of encoded information. In America, this is the CIA; in Britain, it's MI5; in Vatican City it's Iscariot (Vatican Section XIII).

Cryptography has played a large part in many wars. In the first world war, Mata Hari was responsible for carrying messages back and forth for the German government, causing the deaths of thousands of French soldiers.{{fact}} In the second world war, British soldiers captured the crew and The Enigma Engine of German U-boat U-571, leading to the decryption of Nazi communications and the end of the war.

Other examples of the importance of cryptography include Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg sold US atomic secrets to the USSR at the height of the cold war. They were convicted and executed at Sing Sing prison.

[[category:information technology]]