After the Word War II and during the Cold War, the security in sensitive communications was ruled by Electro-Mechanical Cyphers.
Until the 1950’s the WWII the ECM Mark II was used by the NATO, when it was replaced by machines like the KL-7.
KL-7 was an electro-mechanical rotor-based off-line cipher machine, developed by the National Security Agency (NSA) and was introduced in 1952 and served for many years as the main cipher machine of the US and NATO.
The first world war showed the importance of cryptography on the battlefield, and the danger of weak encryption. The second world war became a defining moment in the history of cryptography and placed it squarely at the center of military and political strategy from that time to the present day.
The Enigma machine was developed by a German Arthur Scherbius in 1918 and was patented in 1919. It was marketed with portability and confidentiality as it sales features, but it had a lack of commercial success. When Germany discovered that they had lost WW I as a result of their cipher having been cracked by the British, despite the high cost, the machine was adopted by the German Navy in 1926, the Army in 1928 and the Air Force in 1935; also it was introduced into service with other sections of the German government.
The 20th century was marked by huge advances in all the humanity areas, and the cryptography not was the exception.
At the begin of the 20th century, cryptography was a labor intensive, error prone process, capable of transforming a small amount of written material into an encoded cipher text form.
With the advancement of communication technology, encryption and decryption came to be actively performed during World War I.
A federal judge ordered Apple to comply with the FBI’s request for technical assistance in the data recovery from the San Bernardino gunmen’s iPhone 5C.
In an open-letter published on Apple’s website, Tim Cook publicly challenged the US government and the FBI, saying what it is asking of the company fundamentally violates the privacy, security, and trust of its customers.
The White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the FBI request for access did not mean they were asking for a “back door” or unauthorized access into the company’s device or for it to be redesigned. “They are simply asking for something that would have an impact on this one device”.
CuaimaCrypt is a cypher designed by Julian Bolivar-Galeno in 2007, with improvements suggested by Jonathan Pastran during the development period.
CuaimaCrypt originally had two versions, CuaimaCrypt Stream Codec (CuaimaCrypt-SC) which was designed for hardware implementation, making encoding data streams in real time; and CuaimaCrypt Block Codec (CuaimaCrypt-BC) which was designed for software implementation because it uses the capacity of PCs to process data blocks efficiently.
Currently the most distributed and used is the CuaimaCrypt-BC and I will focus this article on it.
Speaking to the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C., National Security Agency (NSA) Director Adm. Mike Rogers stressed that the cybersecurity battles the U.S. is destined to fight call for more widespread use of encryption, not less. “What you saw at OPM, you’re going to see a whole lot more of,” he said, referring to the massive hack of the Office of Personnel Management involving the personal data about 20 million people who have gotten background checks.
Watch Rogers’ talk here…
