Abstract
Humankind’s desire to conceal sensitive messages is only surpassed by its ingenuity in devising the means to do so. Properly speaking, the secret to be sent is called a message (also called the plaintext). The sender alters this message by enciphering it or creating a ciphertext which cannot be read by any unauthorized person (an intruder or spy) who may intercept it. This cipher is transmitted to the receiver who deciphers the ciphertext, changing it back into the original message. This whole science is called cryptography. An unauthorized person who wishes to understand the message must break the cipher. Breaking ciphers is the science of cryptanalysis.
... but as the roads between Media and Persia were guarded, he had to contrive a means of sending word secretly, which he did in the following way. He took a hare and cutting open its belly without hurting the fur, he slipped in a letter containing what he wanted to say, and then carefully sewing up the paunch, he gave the hare to one of his most faithful slaves, disguising him as a hunter with nets, and sent him off to Persia . . .1
Herodotus (440 B.C.)
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End Notes
Herodotus, The History of Herodotus (CD: DeskTop BookShop) (Indianapolis: WeMake CDs, Inc., 1994).
D. James Bidzos and Burt S. Kaliski Jr., “An Overview of Cryptography,” LAN TIMES, February 1990.
Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman, “Privacy and Authentication: An Introduction to Cryptography,” Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 67, No. 3, March 1979, 397–427.
Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, “A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems,” Communications of the ACM, Vol. 21, No. 2, February 1978, 120–126.
William Booth, “To Break the Unbreakable Number,” The Washington Post, June 25, 1990, A3.
Paulo Ribenboim, The Book of Prime Number Records, second edition (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1989), p. 478.
Barry A. Cipra, “PCs Factor a ‘Most Wanted’ Number,” Science, Vol. 242, December 23, 1988, 1634.
Private phone conversation with Kurt Stammberger, Technology Marketing Manager, RSA Data Security, Inc., June 22, 1995.
I must give special thanks to both Professor Ronald Rivest of MIT and Kurt R. Stammberger, Sales and Marketing Manager for RSA Data Security, Inc., for all the information they provided to me on the RSA cryptosystem and the RSA factorization contest.
RSA Laboratories, Crypto Bytes, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 1995, 1.
Want to try your hand at additional numbers in the challenge? For more information on the contest and a copy of the numbers write to: RSA Challenge Administrator 100 Marine Parkway, Suite 500 Redwood City, CA 94065 (415) 595–8782 or send e-mail to: challenge-info@rsa.com, or browse the World Wide Web page, http://www.rsa.com.
RSA Laboratories, “Answers to Frequently Asked Questions,” revision 2.0, October 5, 1993.
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© 1996 Calvin C. Clawson
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Clawson, C.C. (1996). Primes and Secret Codes. In: Mathematical Mysteries. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6080-1_10
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