"Success in dealing with unknown ciphers is measured by these
four things in the order named: perseverance, careful methods of
analysis, intuition, luck." So begins the first chapter of Colonel
...Parker Hitt's 1916 Manual for the Solution of Military
Ciphers , a foundational text in the history of cryptology. An
irrepressible innovator, Hitt possessed those qualities in
abundance. His manual, cipher devices, and proactive mentorship of
Army cryptology during World War I laid the groundwork for the
modern American cryptologic system. Though he considered himself an
infantryman, Hitt is best known as the "father of American military
cryptology."
In Parker Hitt: The Father of American Military
Cryptology , Betsy Rohaly Smoot brings Hitt's legacy to life,
chronicling his upbringing, multiple careers, ingenious mind, and
independent spirit. In the 1910s, after a decade as an infantry
officer, Hitt set his sights on aviation. Instead, he was drawn to
the applied sciences, designing signal and machine-gun equipment
while applying math to combat problems. Atypical for the time, Hitt
championed women in the workplace. During World War I he suggested
the Army employ American female telephone operators, while his
wife, Genevieve Young Hitt, became the first woman to break ciphers
for the United States government. His daughter, Mary Lue Hitt,
carried on the family legacy as a "code girl" during World War II.
Readers of Elizabeth Cobb's The Hello Girls , Liza Mundy's
Code Girls, and David Kahn's The Codebreakers
will find in Parker Hitt's story an insightful profile of an
American cryptologic hero and the early twentieth-century military.
Drawing from a never-before-seen cache of Hitt's letters,
photographs, and diaries, Smoot introduces readers to Hitt's life
on the front lines, in classrooms and workshops, and at home.
This unique reference presents 59 biographies of people who were key to the sea services being reasonably prepared to fight the Japanese Empire when the Second World War broke out, and whose advanced ...work proved crucial. These intelligence pioneers invented techniques, procedures, and equipment from scratch, not only allowing the United States to hold its own in the Pacific despite the loss of most of its Fleet at Pearl Harbor, but also laying the foundation of today's intelligence methods and agencies.
One-hundred years ago, in what was clearly an unsophisticated pre-information era, naval intelligence (and foreign intelligence in general) existed in rudimentary forms almost incomprehensible to us today. Founded in 1882, the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI)-the modern world's "oldest continuously operating intelligence agency"-functioned for at least its first forty years with low manning, small budgets, low priority, and no prestige. The navy's early steps into communications intelligence (COMINT), which included activities such as radio interception, radio traffic analysis, and cryptology, came with the 1916 establishment of the Code and Signals Section within the navy's Division of Communications and with the 1924 creation of the "Research Desk" as part of the Section. Like ONI, this COMINT organization suffered from low budgets, manning, priority, and prestige.
The dictionary focuses on these pioneers, many of whom went on, even after World War II, to important positions in the Navy, the State Department, the Armed Forces Security Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency. It reveals the work and innovations of well and lesser-known individuals who created the foundations of today's intelligence apparatus and analysis.
Traffic analysis attacks can counteract end-to-end encryption and use leaked communication metadata to reveal information about communicating parties. With an ever-increasing amount of traffic by an ...ever-increasing number of networked devices, communication privacy is undermined. Therefore, Anonymous Communication Systems (ACSs) are proposed to hide the relationship between transmitted messages and their senders and receivers, providing privacy properties known as anonymity, unlinkability, and unobservability. This article aims to review research in the ACSs field, focusing on Dining Cryptographers Networks (DCNs). The DCN-based methods are information-theoretically secure and thus provide unconditional unobservability guarantees. Their adoption for anonymous communications was initially hindered because their computational and communication overhead was deemed significant at that time, and scalability problems occurred. However, more recent contributions, such as the possibility to transmit messages of arbitrary length, efficient disruption handling and overhead improvements, have made the integration of modern DCN-based methods more realistic. In addition, the literature does not follow a common definition for privacy properties, making it hard to compare the approaches' gains. Therefore, this survey contributes to introducing a harmonized terminology for ACS privacy properties, then presents an overview of the underlying principles of ACSs, in particular, DCN-based methods, and finally, investigates their alignment with the new harmonized privacy terminologies. Previous surveys did not cover the most recent research advances in the ACS area or focus on DCN-based methods. Our comprehensive investigation closes this gap by providing visual maps to highlight privacy properties and discussing the most promising ideas for making DCNs applicable in resource-constrained environments.
In this article, we further investigate opacity of discrete event systems. In our previous work, we defined three types of opacity: strong opacity, weak opacity, and no opacity. Strong opacity can be ...used to study security-related problems whereas no opacity can be used to study fault detection and diagnosis problems. In this study, we investigate the properties of (strong, weak, and no) opacity. We show that opacity is often closed under union, but may not be closed under the intersection. We also investigate the largest opaque sublanguages and the smallest opaque superlanguages of a language if the language is not opaque. We derive formulas for these sublanguages and superlanguages. We then extend these results from centralized opacity to decentralized opacity, when more than one observer or controller is observing the system. Finally, we apply the results to the Dining Cryptographers Problem. We show that the protocol proposed in the literature satisfies both no opacity (the cryptographers know if the boss is paying) and strong opacity (the cryptographers do not know who is paying if the boss is not paying). We also use the formulas derived in this article to synthesize the protocol, which is much more difficult to do than verifying the protocol.
Privacy requires more than just encryption of data before and during transmission. Privacy would actually demand hiding the sheer fact that communication takes place. This requires to protect ...meta-data from observation. We motivate the need for strong privacy protection in a smart home use case by highlighting the privacy issues that cannot be solved by confidentiality mechanisms like encryption alone. Our solution is a implementation of DC-net on Re-Mote sensor nodes running Contiki OS. From this, we conclude that the computational and network overheads imposed by these techniques do not make them impractical to use in the IoT. To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first implementation of DC-net on sensors. Alongside, we provide a survey of the required strong cryptographic security mechanisms, like encryption of communication, to be in place. We describe how the current existing techniques can be facilitated to achieve unobservable communication for the IoT. This includes mechanisms for encrypted IoT communication like DTLS or message authentication like ECDSA signatures on IoT devices. For readers unfamiliar with the concepts of MIXing and DC-net, we explain and analyse how those techniques, formerly used to provide private communication in the Internet, can be applied to the IoT. We briefly survey what complementary features from the IoT architecture are helpful in providing strong protection in this particular use case. Finally, we state some recommendations hoping that following these will enable us to reduce the privacy invasiveness of the IoT on all levels. We think that this will be indispensable if IoT devices shall become a part of our daily lives without rendering us into an Orwellian society.
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