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Physics World

Strip search

Petar Grujić

Published May 1, 1998• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

While reading the article on recent advances in quantum cryptography (March pp41–45), it occurred to me that secret ways of transmitting a message have been used since the invention of the written word, and probably even before. For example, the ancient Greeks used the so-called skytale secret letter to conceal their messages, as Thucydides reported in his account of the Peloponnesian war.

DOI
10.1088/2058-7058/11/5/22

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While reading the article on recent advances in quantum cryptography (March pp41–45), it occurred to me that secret ways of transmitting a message have been used since the invention of the written word, and probably even before. For example, the ancient Greeks used the so-called skytale secret letter to conceal their messages, as Thucydides reported in his account of the Peloponnesian war.
Abstract Human desire to communicate secretly is at least as old as writing itself and goes back to the beginnings of our civilisation. Methods of secret communication were developed by many ancient societies, including those of Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China, but details regarding the origins of cryptology remain unknown (Kahn 1967). We know that it was the Spartans, the most warlike of the Greeks, who pioneered military cryptography in Europe. Around 400 BC they employed a device known as a scytale. The device, used for communication between military commanders, consisted of a tapered baton around which was wrapped a spiral strip of parchment or leather containing the message. Words were then written lengthwise along the baton, one letter on each revolution of the strip. When unwrapped, the letters of the message appeared scrambled and the parchment was sent on its way. The receiver wrapped the parchment around another baton of the same shape and the original message reappeared.
Cryptography has had a long and distinguished history of military and diplomatic use dating back to the ancient Greeks. But secure communications are becoming increasingly important for commercial applications as well. In 1986, for instance, a satellite television broadcast in the US was interrupted by a message from a hacker known as “Captain Midnight”. The incident highlighted how easy it was for an unauthorized party to gain control of a satellite system, and sparked a massive criminal investigation. It also motivated researchers to find new ways of ensuring that messages transmitted to and from satellites remain secret.
We dance round in a ring and suppose, But the Secret sits in the middle and knows. Robert Frost, The Secret Sits (1942) In this chapter we explore the merging of quantum computation and classical cryptography. This is a new and exciting field of pure and applied research known as quantum cryptography . We begin with the basics of classical cryptography in Section 9.1. Section 9.2 demonstrates a quantum cryptographic protocol that uses two different bases. We improve on this in Section 9.3, where a protocol with one basis is employed. Section 9.4 shows how to use entanglement to secretly send a message. We conclude with Section 9.5, in which teleportation is demonstrated. CLASSICAL CRYPTOGRAPHY Before delving into quantum cryptography, we need to familiarize ourselves with the core ideas of classical cryptography. A good place to start is the following definition. Definition 9.1.1 Cryptography is the art of concealing messages . Indeed, this is precisely what the etymology reveals: “Cryptography” is a compound of two Greek words, crypton and graphein , which mean, respectively, hidden and writing. Turning an ordinary message into an indecipherable one is called encryption . The opposite action, i.e., restoring the original message, is decryption . The original message is generally referred to as the plaintext , and the encrypted message is the ciphertext . A method for encryption is often referred to as an encryption protocol .