80 research outputs found
Collegiate Codebreakers: Winthrop, Women, and War
During World War II, college-aged women from across the nation filled United States Army and Navy secretive cryptanalysis facilities to help win the war. For many women, colleges facilitated involvement in codebreaking. Through information gathered in oral histories, this thesis primarily explores war related programs at American colleges and the young women that became cryptanalysts. Academic institutions, like Winthrop College, became the nuclei for colligate codebreakers. They acted as early crypt education centers, through the offering of cryptology classes, functioned as recruitment centers, and operated as essential training hubs. While in school, young women were saturated by a climate of war and secrecy as campuses became militarized during this period. Their careers in academia and moral character came into account when cryptanalysis sectors began searching for loyal workers. While working as codebreakers for the United States government, women experienced a degree of freedom and witnessed a change in their position. In the name of the war effort and patriotic ideologies, female cryptanalysts broke codes and tested the strength of American ciphers. From college campuses to Army and Navy facilities, young women played essential roles in the war effort
E-voting discourses in the UK and the Netherlands
A qualitative case study of the e-voting discourses in the UK and the Netherlands was performed based on the theory of strategic niche management. In both countries, eight e-voting experts were interviewed on their expectations, risk estimations, cooperation and learning experiences. The results show that differences in these variables can partly explain the variations in the embedding of e-voting in the two countries, from a qualitative point of view
“As an American, may I have the privilege of pulling the switch?” : The Fate of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg During the Second Red Scare in Cold War America
The Cold War escalated at the end of World War II when the tension between the United States and Soviet Union significantly increased. The stakes of the Cold War were considerably high, especially during the atomic age. Hence the creation of the Venona Project, which began in 1943 and was originally a small project intended to break down Soviet diplomatic communications, but later expanded to be a full-blown counterintelligence operation. The project’s American cryptologists took nearly two years to decode the first Soviet coded telegraph cable. The project exposed multiple Soviet Spies in the United States, some of the most famous being Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were implicated when Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass alerted the FBI to their involvement in a Soviet spy ring. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg never confessed to conspiracy to provide atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, and both were ultimately executed by electric chair in 1953. David Greenglass, who turned his family into the FBI, did not experience the same fate as his sister and brother-in-law. Through analysis of court documents, decoded cables, and media coverage of the trial, I discuss the four factors that led to the execution of the Rosenbergs and the legitimacy of their trial and its outcome. These factors include the location of the Rosenbergs, their Communist party membership, Ethel Rosenberg’s submissive position as a woman in the 1950s, and anti-semitism in the United States
Mercury of the Waves: Modern Cryptology and U.S. Literature
Mercury of the Waves: Modern Cryptology and U.S. LiteratureHenry VeggianUniversity of Pittsburgh, 2005The doctoral dissertation examines United States literary and institutional history during the period 1900-1973. The study demonstrates how cryptology was detached from its philological residence over three phases (the amateur, institutional, and professional). In the amateur phase, which was regionally specific to the Midwest, the science was characterized by social reformist debate. In the second, institutional phase, the amateur version of cryptology was institutionalized by the United States federal government following WWI to imitate a specific institutional model (that of the French Bureau du Chiffre). During the third, professional phase, the prior two were enhanced during the interwar period by linguists, mechanical engineers, literary modernists, and cryptologists. Running parallel to this narrative is a modern American literary genealogy that, beginning with Henry Adams and extending through Thomas Pynchon, engaged cryptology during that same era. The dissertation locates their discourse within Vichian humanism, and in doing so it first explains how modern literature (and the American novel in particular), its practices, and institutions contributed discursive rhetoric, hermeneutical methods, and institutional models to the emergent 20th century U.S. security state; secondly, it argues that a particular genealogical style that spans the writings of Henry Adams, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, and Thomas Pynchon elaborated an diverse rhetorical discourse by which to respond to that assemblage of new institutional entities, and without which that assemblage would be incoherent
July 2016, Volume 12, Number 2
https://digitalcommons.winthrop.edu/retrospect/1031/thumbnail.jp
Project VENONA: Breaking the Unbreakable Code
Project VENONA was a top-secret counterintelligence program initiated by the United States Army Signals Intelligence Service during World War II. VENONA was established to decipher intercepted Soviet communications and break the “unbreakable” Soviet code system. Examining Project VENONA and its discoveries is vital to understanding the history of the early Cold War
Security Evaluation of Russian GOST Cipher
Survey of All Known Attacks on Russian Government Encryption Standard. In this talk we will survey some 30 recent attacks on the Russian GOST block cipher. Background: GOST cipher is the official encryption standard of the Russian federation, and also has special versions for the most important Russian banks. Until 2012 there was no attack on GOST when it is used in encryption with random keys. I have developed more than 30 different academic attacks on GOST the fastest has complexity of 2^118 to recover some but not all 256-bit keys generated at random, which will be presented for the first time at CCC conference. It happens only once per decade that a government standard is broken while it is still an official government standard (happened for DES and AES, no other cases known). All these are broken only in academic sense, for GOST most recent attacks are sliding into maybe arguably practical in 30 years from now instead of 200 years... Our earlier results were instrumental at ISO for rejecting GOST as an international encryption standard last year. Not more than 5+ block cihers have ever achieved this level of ISO standardisation in 25 years and it NEVER happended in history of ISO that a cipher got broken during the standardization process. Two main papers with 70+30 pages respectively which are http://eprint.iacr.org/2011/626 and http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/138. Two other papers have been already published in Cryptologia journal which specializes in serious military and government crypto. The talk will cover three main families of attacks on GOST: high-level transformations, low- level inversion/MITM/guess-then-software/algebraic attacks and advanced truncated differential cryptanalysis of GOST. Plan for the talk: First I cover the history of GOST with major Cold War history events as the necessary background. Then I describe in details three main families of attacks: 1) self-smilarity attacks which generalize slide fixed point and reflection attacks, and provide a large variety of ways in which the security of the full GOST cipher with 32 rounds can be reduced to the security of GOST with 8 rounds in a black box reduction and thus the task of the cryptanalys is split into two well-defined tasks. 2) detailed software/algebraic and MITM attacks on 8 rounds and how weak diffusion in GOST helps. 3) advanced truncated differential attacks on GOS
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