Comment Articles

A secret everyone should know

Michael J. Miller AnchorDesk

Published: 19 Mar 2001 16:44 GMT

Author Steven Levy does a great job of explaining how secret codes progressed from being something used by government agencies into a critical part of the technology we all use to protect our privacy on the Internet. (A disclaimer: Levy and I used to work together years ago, and I loved his previous books, including Hackers.)

Along the way, he explains how an unlikely group of iconoclasts and outsiders ended up creating the cryptography we use today. The heart of the story focuses on Whitfield Diffie, who came up with the concept of public-key encryption.

Levy follows up with accounts of the creation of every important encryption scheme used today, starting with the IBM mathematicians who created the Data Encryption Standard, why it ended up with just a 56-bit key, and why the NSA ended up believing IBM did "too good a job." The book goes on to describe how Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman created RSA encryption and how Phil Zimmerman's Pretty Good Privacy came to represent very good encryption for lots of users.

As interesting as the stories of these inventors are, they take a back seat to the parallel stories of the development of codes and code breaking, both inside and outside the government. Levy suggests that these outsiders, by creating codes that work for all of us, have protected privacy for everyone -- privacy that was endangered by the computer revolution.

In making the case for codes and encryption, Levy makes the case for everyone's privacy. And that's why Crypto is not only interesting but also important reading.

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