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Cryptographers
This is a list of cryptographers. Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties called adversaries. Pre twentieth century * Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi: wrote a (now lost) book on cryptography titled the "''Book of Cryptographic Messages''". * Al-Kindi, 9th century Arabic polymath and originator of frequency analysis. * Athanasius Kircher, attempts to decipher crypted messages * Augustus the Younger, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, wrote a standard book on cryptography * Ibn Wahshiyya: published several cipher alphabets that were used to encrypt magic formulas. * John Dee, wrote an occult book, which in fact was a cover for crypted text * Ibn 'Adlan: 13th-century cryptographer who made important contributions on the sample size of the frequency analysis. * Duke of Mantua Francesco I Gonzaga is the one who used the earliest example of homophonic Substitution cipher in early 1400s. * Ibn al-Durayhim: gave detailed ...
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Cryptography
Cryptography, or cryptology (from "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logy, -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of Adversary (cryptography), adversarial behavior. More generally, cryptography is about constructing and analyzing Communication protocol, protocols that prevent third parties or the public from reading private messages. Modern cryptography exists at the intersection of the disciplines of mathematics, computer science, information security, electrical engineering, digital signal processing, physics, and others. Core concepts related to information security (confidentiality, data confidentiality, data integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation) are also central to cryptography. Practical applications of cryptography include electronic commerce, Smart card#EMV, chip-based payment cards, digital currencies, password, computer passwords, and military communications. ...
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Cryptanalysis
Cryptanalysis (from the Greek ''kryptós'', "hidden", and ''analýein'', "to analyze") refers to the process of analyzing information systems in order to understand hidden aspects of the systems. Cryptanalysis is used to breach cryptographic security systems and gain access to the contents of encrypted messages, even if the cryptographic key is unknown. In addition to mathematical analysis of cryptographic algorithms, cryptanalysis includes the study of side-channel attacks that do not target weaknesses in the cryptographic algorithms themselves, but instead exploit weaknesses in their implementation. Even though the goal has been the same, the methods and techniques of cryptanalysis have changed drastically through the history of cryptography, adapting to increasing cryptographic complexity, ranging from the pen-and-paper methods of the past, through machines like the British Bombes and Colossus computers at Bletchley Park in World War II, to the mathematically advanced ...
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Ibn 'Adlan
ʻAfīf al-Dīn ʻAlī ibn ʻAdlān al-Mawsilī (; 1187–1268 CE), born in Mosul, was an Arab cryptologist, linguist and poet who is known for his early contributions to cryptanalysis, to which he dedicated at least two books. He was also involved in literature and poetry, and taught on the Arabic language at the Al-Salihiyya Mosque of Cairo. He was in contact with various rulers of his time, and in this capacity he gained practical experience in cryptanalysis or the science of breaking encoded messages. He dedicated ''On Cryptanalysis,'' his only surviving work on the topic'','' to Al-Ashraf Musa (), the Ayyubid Emir of Damascus. He wrote three other books, including ''Al-Mu'lam'' (''The Told ook'), also on cryptanalysis, but it is now lost. ''On Cryptanalysis'' is a sort of guidebook for cryptanalysts, containing twenty sets of techniques he calls "rules". The methods contains more practical details than Al-Kindi's 8th century ''Treatise on Deciphering Cryptographic Messa ...
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Étienne Bazeries
Étienne Bazeries (21 August 1846, in Port Vendres – 7 November 1931, in Noyon) was a French military cryptanalyst active between 1890 and the World War I, First World War. He is best known for developing the "Bazeries Cylinder", an improved version of Thomas Jefferson's cipher cylinder. It was later refined into the US Army M-94 cipher device. Historian David Kahn (writer), David Kahn describes him as "''the great pragmatist of cryptology. His theoretical contributions are negligible, but he was one of the greatest natural cryptanalysts the science has seen.''" (Kahn 1996, p244) Bazeries was born in Port-Vendres, France, the son of a mounted policeman. In 1863 he enlisted in the army, and fought in the Franco-Prussian War, where he was taken prisoner of war, prisoner, although he later managed to escape disguised as a bricklayer. In 1874 he was promoted to lieutenant, and sent to Algeria in 1875. He returned to France the following year and married Marie-Louise-Elodie Berthon, ...
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Giovan Battista Bellaso
Giovan Battista Bellaso (Brescia 1505–...) was an Italian cryptologist. The Vigenère cipher is named after Blaise de Vigenère, although Giovan Battista Bellaso had invented it before Vigenère described his autokey cipher. Biography Bellaso was born of a distinguished family in 1505. His father was Piervincenzo, a patrician of Brescia, owner since the 15th century of a house in town and a suburban estate in Capriano, in a neighborhood called Fenili Belasi (Bellaso's barns), including the Holy Trinity chapel. The chaplain was remunerated each year with a regular salary, and a supply of firewood. The family coat of arms was ‘‘On a blue field three red-tongued gold lion heads in side view”. Bellaso received a degree in civil law at the University of Padua in 1538. The French author, Blaise de Vigenère, reported that he was serving as a secretary in the suite of Cardinal Rodolfo Pio di Carpi and credited him with the invention of the reciprocal table, now calle ...
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Al-Khalil Ibn Ahmad Al-Farahidi
Abu ‘Abd ar-Raḥmān al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad ibn ‘Amr ibn Tammām al-Farāhīdī al-Azdī al-Yaḥmadī (; 718 – 786 CE), known as al-Farāhīdī, or al-Khalīl, was an Arab philologist, lexicographer and leading grammarian of Basra in Iraq. He made the first dictionary of the Arabic language – and the oldest extant dictionary – '' Kitab al-'Ayn'' ( "The Source")Introduction to ''Early Medieval Arabic: Studies on Al-Khalīl Ibn Ahmad'', pg. 3. Ed. Karin C. Ryding. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1998. – introduced the now standard harakat (vowel marks in Arabic script) system, and was instrumental in the early development of ʿArūḍ (study of prosody),al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad
at the
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Leone Battista Alberti
Leon Battista Alberti (; 14 February 1404 – 25 April 1472) was an Italian Renaissance humanist author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, and cryptographer; he epitomised the nature of those identified now as polymaths. He is considered the founder of European cryptography, a claim he shares with Johannes Trithemius. He is often considered primarily an architect. However, according to James Beck, "to single out one of Leon Battista's 'fields' over others as somehow functionally independent and self-sufficient is of no help at all to any effort to characterize Alberti's extensive explorations in the fine arts". Although Alberti is known mostly as an artist, he was also a mathematician and made significant contributions to that field. Among the most famous buildings he designed are the churches of San Sebastiano (1460) and Sant'Andrea (1472), both in Mantua. Alberti's life was told in Giorgio Vasari's ''Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and ...
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Ahmad Al-Qalqashandi
Shihāb al-Dīn Abū 'l-Abbās Aḥmad ibn ‘Alī ibn Aḥmad ‘Abd Allāh al-Fazārī al-Shāfiʿī better known by the epithet al-Qalqashandī (; 1355 or 1356 – 1418), was a medieval Arab Egyptian encyclopedist, polymath and mathematician. A native of the Nile Delta, he became a Scribe of the Scroll (''Katib al-Darj''), or clerk of the Mamluk chancery in Cairo, Egypt. His magnum opus is the voluminous administrative encyclopedia ''Ṣubḥ al-Aʿshá''. ''Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā'' ''Ṣubḥ al-Aʿshá fī Ṣināʿat al-Inshāʾ'' ('The Dawn of the Blind' or 'Daybreak for the Night-Blind regarding the Composition of Chancery Documents'); a fourteen-volume encyclopedia completed in 1412, is an administrative manual on geography, political history, natural history, zoology, mineralogy, cosmography, and time measurement. Based on the ''Masālik al-abṣār fī mamālik al-amṣar'' of Shihab al-Umari, it has been called "one of the final expressions of the genre of Arabic ...
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Ibn Al-Durayhim
ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Ibn Futūḥ ibn Ibrahīm ibn Abū Bakr (; 1312–1359/62 CE), known as Ibn Durayhim al-Mawsilī () was an Arab writer, mathematician, cryptologist and scribe. Cryptology Ibn al-Durayhim gave detailed descriptions of eight cipher systems that discussed substitution ciphers, leading to the earliest suggestion of a " tableau" of the kind that two centuries later became known as the " Vigenère table". His book entitled ''Clear Chapters Goals and Solving Ciphers'' (مقاصد الفصول المترجمة عن حل الترجمة) was recently discovered, but has yet to be published. It includes the use of the statistical techniques pioneered by Al-Kindi and Ibn 'Adlan. ''The Book on the Usefulness of Animals'' In the year 1355 CE, Ibn al-Durayhim compiled the ''Book on the Usefulness of Animals'' (). The work draws largely on the work of Ibn Bakhtīshūʿ and Aristotle Aristotle (; 384–322 BC) was an Ancient Greek p ...
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Frequency Analysis
In cryptanalysis, frequency analysis (also known as counting letters) is the study of the frequency of letters or groups of letters in a ciphertext. The method is used as an aid to breaking classical ciphers. Frequency analysis is based on the fact that, in any given stretch of written language, certain letters and combinations of letters occur with varying frequencies. Moreover, there is a characteristic distribution of letters that is roughly the same for almost all samples of that language. For instance, given a section of English language, , , and are the most common, while , , and are rare. Likewise, , , , and are the most common pairs of letters (termed ''bigrams'' or ''digraphs''), and , , , and are the most common repeats. The nonsense phrase " ETAOIN SHRDLU" represents the 12 most frequent letters in typical English language text. In some ciphers, such properties of the natural language plaintext are preserved in the ciphertext, and these patterns have the poten ...
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Augustus The Younger, Duke Of Brunswick-Lüneburg
Augustus II (10 April 1579 – 17 September 1666), called the Younger (), a member of the House of Welf was Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg. In the estate division of the House of Welf of 1635, he received the Principality of Wolfenbüttel which he ruled until his death. Considered one of the most literate princes of his time, he is known for founding the Herzog August Library at his Wolfenbüttel residence, then the largest collection of books and manuscripts north of the Alps. Life Augustus was born at Dannenberg Castle, the seventh child of Duke Henry of Brunswick-Lüneburg (1533–1598). His father had ruled over the Brunswick Principality of Lüneburg, jointly with his younger brother William, since 1559. Ten years later, however, upon his marriage with Ursula, a daughter of the Ascanian duke Francis I of Saxe-Lauenburg, he had to waive all rights and claims and was compensated with the small Dannenberg lordship. Moreover, he received an annual payment and had r ...
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Al-Kindi
Abū Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq aṣ-Ṣabbāḥ al-Kindī (; ; ; ) was an Arab Muslim polymath active as a philosopher, mathematician, physician, and music theorist Music theory is the study of theoretical frameworks for understanding the practices and possibilities of music. '' The Oxford Companion to Music'' describes three interrelated uses of the term "music theory": The first is the " rudiments", that .... Al-Kindi was the first of the Early Islamic philosophy, Islamic peripatetic philosophers, and is hailed as the "father of Arab philosophy". Al-Kindi was born in Kufa and educated in Baghdad. He became a prominent figure in the House of Wisdom, and a number of Abbasid Caliphs appointed him to oversee the translation of Ancient Greece, Greek scientific and philosophical texts into the Arabic language. This contact with "the philosophy of the ancients" (as Hellenistic philosophy was often referred to by Muslim scholars) had a profound effect on him, as he synthes ...
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