There are days I wish I got started on cryptography a long time ago and that I had a drive to really get into it. It does fascinate me, but there seems to be so much out there and continually growing daily.
It is fun to look back in history at codes, code breakers and the like. But how is it done today? How many computers would I need? What software do I use?
I was playing around with a seemingly simple Win32 Crypt32.dll wrapper class in C#. I could enter text, decrypt it. Pretty secure for what little need I have. You have to be logged in as me to decrypt. I ran the application as a different user on the same machine to check.
I then changed the code to use the machine credentials. Both users could decrypt the message. If I had second machine I would try running the demo on that machine. I figure it would not decrypt.
Naturally I started asking a bunch of questions. Aside from how to encrypt images and other stuff, I wondered what algorithms I should start on with my investigation to learn all this stuff. Is it possible to learn it all? If some got a hold of my encrypted message how could they figure out what it was?
That led into a hypothetical discussion. The NSA, for example, probably intercepts volumes of encrypted info everyday. How do they determine what would be worth decrypting?
What would be the incentive? Saving lives?
If someone handed me a file and said if I could figure it out I would get a million dollars, I’d start to see what I could do. Probably not a whole lot, but I’d still try.
Anyway, where would they start in the decrypting process? Is it a complete message? What format was the message in? Is it in a foreign language? Was it just encoded? Encrypted? What algorithm?
Once you have something, how can you verify what it means? A message that says “Sorry wrong number” could mean anything. Was it worth the cost?
Posted by Michael at March 17, 2006 12:39 PM