Word: code
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Israeli mathematician cracks a formidable code...
Five years ago, computer scientists at Stanford and M.I.T. made a pair of chummy but keenly competitive $100 bets. A team at each university had devised a secret code to protect computers from electronic intruders by scrambling and unscrambling the data in a complex fashion. Each team offered cash to the first mathematician who could crack its code, figuring that the deciphering could not be done in much less than a million years. To the surprise of all concerned, however, the Stanford scheme sprang a leak this year, putting $100 in the pocket of a determined young Israeli theoretician...
...past, such a breakthrough in cryptography might have mattered only to a few hundred cryptanalysts and a handful of spies. Today, however, the demonstration of a code's vulnerability nevitably has worrisome implications for the way banks and multinational firms do business. Consider the stakes: the U.S. banking system alone moves some $400 billion by computer around the country every day; yet many banks pump money onto the wires and over satellite networks with little or no encryption, or coding, at all. Predicts Mathematician Ralph Merkle, a member of the Stanford codemaking team: "One of these days someone will...
...Stanford coding system was cracked by Adi Shamir, 30, an Israeli expert in the branch of mathematics known as complexity theory. Shamir was at M.I.T. in the late '70s as an associate professor of mathematics, and in fact helped write the M.I.T. code that competes head-on with Stanford's. Last spring, back in his spartan, second-floor office in the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, the lean, blue-jeaned mathematician settled the old wager: he found a way to unravel the original Stanford system. The code Shamir broke after four years of hard work...
...public-key concept may survive Shamir's master stroke. Secret codes, like fine wines, tend to improve with age. The competing code system Shamir co-authored at M.I.T. remains, for the moment, uncracked. But the discovery of so basic a flaw in the Stanford scheme is no small matter. When public-key codes first started appearing in scientific journals, Admiral Bobby Inman, then head of the National Security Agency and until recently deputy director of the CIA, worried in public about the Soviets' and other hostile nations' learning to develop uncrackable codes simply by studying published...