The Beer Keg Cipher: A Cryptographic Journey | Chaos Lever

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Ned: Do you know in March that it'll be 3 years since we started this podcast?

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Chris: Well, restarted.

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Ned: Yeah. I mean, if you wanna

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Chris: include version 1, it's, like, 13 years.

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Ned: It's, like, 5 decades we've been doing this shit. How are we not sick of each other yet?

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Chris: Oh, yeah. I also am not sick of

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Ned: of God. Shut up. Hello, alleged human, and welcome to the chaos lever podcast. My name is Ned, and I'm definitely not a robot. I am a real human person who's not made up of quantum entanglements and spooky behavior.

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Ned: Oh, that would have been better for Halloween. Anyway, with me, it's Chris, who's also here. Hi, Chris.

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Chris: I enjoy the fact that all of our good jokes are at least a month late.

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Ned: On the geological time scale, they're timely.

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Chris: That's fair.

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Ned: And I don't know how to operate on any other time scale due to my extreme humanness.

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Chris: Good cover.

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Ned: Thanks. I do really well.

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Chris: Everyone completely bought it.

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Ned: Just nodding their head. So I thought we could do a little housekeeping, because it's almost the end of the year.

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Chris: It is not my turn to vacuum. Leave me the f alone.

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Ned: You don't vacuum anyway. You just push around that weird thing that rolls. It's not a vacuum cleaner.

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Chris: It does the popping bubbles, and it brings me joy.

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Ned: Can't argue with that. In other housekeeping news, dear listener, we have an audience survey. We would like you to take that survey, and it's very conveniently located at kslever.com/survey. I tried to make it as easy as possible, Chris.

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Chris: Even I could have guessed that.

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Ned: So if you would like to provide your feedback, and, of course, there'll be posts about this as well. But if you'd like to provide your feedback about the podcast and how we do everything right and we're amazing, then the survey is awaiting for you.

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Chris: Many answers have been prefilled in.

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Ned: 5 out of 5. No notes. In fact, there's no questions. You just have to put in your email so we can send you garbage. I mean, a newsletter.

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Ned: Are we doing a newsletter?

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Chris: It's being rejiggered.

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Ned: You shut your filthy mouth.

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Chris: There's a family show.

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Ned: Last thing, because we never ask for this, and I feel like we probably should. If you feel like going on Apple Podcasts and writing a rating, Castlevver only has, like, 1, and that is sad. And it's about us being mean to Elon Musk. And surprisingly, they did they did not give us a high number of stars for doing so. So I have only 2 things to say about that.

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Ned: Fuck Elon Musk, and 2 stars is good enough for me.

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Chris: That could very well be the name of your autobiography.

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Ned: 2 stars is good enough for me. Oh, story of almost making it. Not even a bronze medal. Oh, let's talk about some tech garbage, shall we?

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Chris: Sure. Alright. Okay. Oh, you want me to go?

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Ned: Anytime.

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Chris: So news will actually start this 1, and this is gonna be part of the category that we call this started out as a lightning round article, and I just kept on going.

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Ned: Oh, I got 1 of those for, like, 2 weeks from now.

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Chris: It was announced that quantum encryption researchers broke a 50 bit RSA key. And if you have been paying attention to the space at all, this is actually a big deal. So first, let's define some terms. Okay. Encryption or cryptography or what have you.

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Chris: All of it is a fancy way of saying, I've got a secret, and you can't have it. Right. Unless you have a a quantum computer, apparently. This week, researchers from Shanghai University announced the breaking of a 50 bit RSA key using publicly available D Wave Quantum systems. Oh.

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Chris: And that's another reason that this is a big deal. Now it's not that breaking a 50 bit RSA key is actually hard, mind you. Mhmm. RSA is on the naughty list. 50 bits is real small number, and classical computers have been able to do it for decades now.

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Chris: We don't use those anymore. No. But still, as a research target, this shows the impressive progress that quantum decryption has been able to make over the past few years. And remember, this is part of why this is terrifying. Classical computers do this in a brute force manner.

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Chris: You tried 1 number, it doesn't work. You try the next number, it doesn't work. Rinse and repeat as fast as you possibly can until you get to the answer. Quantum computers don't do that. I'm not gonna get into it in this episode, but let's just suffice to say they do it different.

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Chris: And the fact that they can do this with a 50 bit number is impressive. So to put that into context, a 50 bit number is roughly 15 digits long.

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Ned: Okay.

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Chris: So we're talking about a number in the quadrillion range or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. It's a big number. We talked about powers of 10 many times. That's a lot of numbers.

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Ned: Mhmm.

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Chris: And they broke it with quantum computing and quantum algorithms. To put this into context, like I said, back in 2020, the best that quantum computers could handle was a 5 bit number. And that 5 bit number was 15. Later on, big news, we did 21.

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Ned: Oh, okay.

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Chris: So, yeah, from that to something quadrillion, that is a huge leap forward in just 4 years.

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Ned: Right. And the nature of this is it does this in a massively parallel way. So Yes. The more cubits you can have stably in a system, the larger the number you can crack.

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Chris: Correct.

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Ned: Okay.

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Chris: A lot of it comes down to error correction like we've talked about before. The d the d link systems I was talking about, they have numbers that are boasting 5,000 cubits. But there's nobody on earth that can run an algorithm with 5,000 cubits because the error rate is just absolutely insane. It's effectively a 100%.

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Ned: Right. So You said D Link, and I know that's what not what you meant, but it would be amazing if D Link also had quantum systems.

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Chris: Now available at your local Best Buy.

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Ned: The new WRLQ. Q is for quantum.

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Chris: Anyway, I don't wanna get too far down that rabbit hole, for reasons that you'll see as we go along.

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Ned: Okay.

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Chris: The breakthrough has unsettled many insecurity because it is a reminder that the future is coming, and that future using quantum computers basically breaks a lot of encryptions that exist in the world.

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Ned: Yes.

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Chris: Over the past few years, there has been a trend of hackers downloading encrypted data that they know they can't decrypt

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Ned: Mhmm.

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Chris: And just waiting. Yeah. Because like I said, the quantum computers that exist and these these algorithms, this is all public. Once quantum computers get to a certain size and reliability, all of that previously downloaded data is gonna be decrypted immediately Woah. Which is bad.

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Chris: But yeah. This trend is popular enough that it's got a name, and it's a disturbing, uncomfortable name. It's called harvest now, decrypt later. I guess it's also a real descriptive name. Just Yeah.

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Chris: Just lays it all right out there.

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Ned: There's no ambiguity there.

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Chris: And this is going to be bad, period. Because a lot of the kinds of information that have already been stolen and are already being stored, things like financial records, government secrets, personal information, your diary, Ned, will remain valuable for blackmail purposes oh, wait. Did I say that last 1 out loud? For years or even decades.

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Ned: I think it's important for me to point out here that I use elliptical curve encryption, so I'm safe for the moment.

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Chris: Oh, you sweet summer child. Damn it. Again, don't get ahead of me. Anyway, I hope everyone enjoyed the Thanksgiving. So in light of all that sunshine and rainbows, I thought it would be fun to take a look at the history of cryptography and encryption.

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Chris: See where we started as a species, how just fantastically optimistic code creators were and are all through history. And if there's time, we'll take a take a look at the quantum stuff and see where we might be headed next. Alright. Sound like fun? No?

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Chris: Great. Let's get started.

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Ned: We enjoy fun here on the chaos lever.

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Chris: So like I said, or I meant to say, I can't remember anymore. Today's challenges of keeping data and keeping communications secure from prying eyes, this is not a new problem.

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Ned: Mhmm.

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Chris: We, as a species, have been dealing with secrecy since we learned to write, and it's highly likely that it was before that. Now prehistory is, of course, impossible to prove. It's a lot of assumptions. But if you think about it, everyone uses encryption and cryptographic communications in their daily lives without even thinking about it. Let me give you a quick example.

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Chris: Okay. So the first thing that we do to talking code, as it were, is using private data to share information in public. Say you have a friend. Tough sledding already, but I know. But stay with me.

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Chris: Alright. Say you have a friend, and you want that friend to know that the person he's talking to cannot be trusted. Problem is that third party is just just right there. Right. So how do you get that information across?

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Chris: So I can tell you that there's a bad way. And the bad way is to just say out loud, hey. This new guy sucks, and you can't trust him. I have it on good authority that this is how you get, a, blackballed from polite society, and, b, potentially punched in the nose, and, c, possibly both. However, what you could do is reference, for example, a prior untrustworthy person from your shared past.

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Chris: You could have a small sentence conversation, something like, oh, nice to meet you, new person Troy. Say, Ned, doesn't Troy remind you of that cool guy Jake that we worked at with at our last job?

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Ned: I remember Jake.

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Chris: Now Troy is none the wiser to what just happened, but Ned knows full well that Jake was not, in fact, a cool guy. No. In fact, Jake still owes Ned $20. That is not the sort of thing that Ned forgets. So now Ned is on guard.

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Ned: I don't care that you wanted stuff from the vending machine. Eventually, you gotta pay me back, Jake. Those snicker bars weren't free.

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Chris: Where's my $2? Oh, references. They're older than we are.

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Ned: They're always so fun. Indeed.

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Chris: Anyway, you just have I just gave you an example of cryptography effectively. You have now shared secret information publicly, and only the recipient got the actual message. So in cryptography, there's 2 terms that came out of this. Right? The first 1 is stenography.

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Chris: I'm embedding a real message in a fake message or hiding a message in something innocuous. Mhmm. And I'm also using a secret that only Ned and I know. Now in this case, the secret is we both know Jake Right. And Troy doesn't.

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Chris: So that is very similar to a symmetric key encryption. We have the key. We can unlock the real message. Right? Mhmm.

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Chris: Incidentally, this is the same way that inside jokes work. The fact that a small audience understands what the f you're talking about is what makes the joke funny.

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Ned: Our small audience agrees, Chris.

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Chris: Oh, I get it.

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Ned: Yeah. Okay. You get things.

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Chris: It's not funny though. It's funny. Yeah. That's right.

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Ned: My favorite kind.

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Chris: So, anyway, we as humans do that now, like, today, all the time. There's absolutely no reason to think that people have just thought this up. We have done this since we talked to each other. Since we invented language, we accidentally invented Jake.

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Ned: Yeah. It's funny. A similar thing happens with humor. If you go back through the written record, you keep finding dick jokes. And every generation thinks that they invented the dick joke, but you know what?

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Ned: No. You didn't. And that just leads me to believe that humans have always been ridiculous.

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Chris: It has ever been thus.

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Ned: Mhmm. And ever will be.

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Chris: So if we fast forward a little bit and get into actual written records, we can start to say things with authority. The first example we have of cryptography of any kind comes from, you guessed it, New Jersey. No. Ancient Egypt.

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Ned: Okay.

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Chris: Now there's an argument about the fine points about this because we're talking about crazy ancient history. But the story goes that's 2,000 BCE or so, at least some Egyptian cults were intentionally altering hieroglyphics as part of religious ceremonies, religious secret knowledge, ways to keep certain information obscure. Mhmm. Now we know that this happened at the very least because we know what hieroglyphics mean now. And we can go into these various secret caves and see that they're being used in different ways or modified in different fashions.

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Chris: Clearly, there was intent. This was you know, you can't accidentally hieroglyph. It takes too long.

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Ned: Yeah.

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Chris: So, similarly, it's secret information similar to our Ned, Jake Troy example above. If you didn't know, then you didn't know.

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Ned: Yeah. I get it.

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Chris: Now You know it? Fast forward to about 500 BC, and, some more clear examples of obvious intentional ciphers intended to send messages start to appear. 1 of the most common that people know about, comes to us from ancient Greece, and the technology comes from, you guessed it, war. Of course. What is it good for?

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Chris: Encryption? Keeping secrets from the enemy, which I think is that's how the that's how the song goes. Right?

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Ned: Sounds right. Yeah.

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Chris: Yeah. Yeah. So the Spartans, big, big war guys. Mhmm. Pro war for it.

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Chris: Love it.

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Ned: I've seen the documentary 300. I know what's up.

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Chris: They would use something called the Scytale cipher. It's s c y t a l e. I am sure it's probably actually a Greek word, so I apologize to the Greek listeners for me massacring that pronunciation. But the side tail cipher, I'm just gonna keep doing it. Mhmm.

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Chris: It requires the writer and the reader to have a shared secret. In this case, it's a dowel or a stick of a specific diameter. What you would do as a writer, you would take your stick and you would take a strip of parchment that was, like, 1 letter wide. So very long, very narrow, and you would wrap it around the stick. So it completely covered it 1 layer at a time.

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Chris: Then you hold it in place, and you write lengthwise. You write your first sentence. You turn the stick a little bit so there's more room. You write the second sentence. You go all the way around the dowel Mhmm.

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Chris: And you're done. Now, obviously, you can't write a gigantic message here, but you can get this across. And then once you take the dowel out, all you have is a long piece of parchment with a bunch of letters that are completely out of order. Right. Anybody that captured that messenger would look at that, and they would have absolutely no idea what they were doing.

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Chris: They would see nothing but a meaningless stretch of letters. And the thing about it is back then, there was rarely spaces, and there was no punctuation. Yeah. So yeah.

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Ned: You Like that.

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Chris: By trial and error, crack this code, especially if you knew what they were doing. Right? So what it was just have a bucket full of sticks and just wrap it over and over again until you found 1 that put the letters in an order that made sense. Right? So even with this kind of clever, very very jury rigged way of doing a muddled message, immediately the code had code breakers.

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Chris: Right. And you'll see this is a common theme throughout history. So fast forward again to the 1st century BC, and we're gonna migrate, north. And I wait. Which 1 is left?

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Chris: Is that east? I don't know where countries are. Let's go with northeast.

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Ned: Okay.

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Chris: We're talking Romans. In particular, 1 you might have heard of named Julius Caesar.

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Ned: Mhmm.

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Chris: And, yes, I know that's not how you pronounce it. I'm gonna do it anyway. Now, Ned. Yes. Do you know what it is I'm about to talk about?

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Ned: Yes. I'll give you a hint. You don't need to.

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Chris: It's called the Caesar cipher.

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Ned: Uh-huh. Do you give up? I give up this day.

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Chris: I just say jlyhx s? Oh,

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Ned: yeah.

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Chris: So since Ned has no idea, I'm gonna explain it to him.

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Ned: Alright. Fine.

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Chris: The Caesar cipher lives on today as what's called a rotational cipher, the most famous version of which is called rot 13. Get it? Rotate and then the number 13.

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Ned: Yep.

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Chris: You you following? You keeping up?

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Ned: I'm trying. It's very difficult. Super complicated stuff.

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Chris: I'll whiteboard it for you later.

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Ned: Excellent.

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Chris: The idea is a simple substitution. Okay? You pick a random number, and then you substitute each letter for whatever letter is that random number ahead. So an a is 1, a b is 2, a c is 3, a d is 4. Mhmm.

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Chris: Right? Now let's say the random number that we picked was 3, which allegedly was Caesar's favorite number for this particular scheme. Like I said, a would be 1, d is 4, 1 plus 3 is 4, so an a becomes a d. A b becomes an e Mhmm. All the way through the alphabet.

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Chris: And when you do that, you can then turn words that make sense to people like g I v e u p. Using the Caesar cipher of 3, it becomes jlyhx s. Mhmm. I really hope that's right. I didn't double check it.

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Chris: And, again, remember, we're talking about a language that had no spaces and no punctuation. So once again, you are left with a giant block of text that is made totally incomprehensible.

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Ned: Right.

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Chris: The beauty of this code is in its simplicity. You don't even need a stick this time. Right. All you need is a random number, and that random number could change depending on whatever conditions you choose. It could be a 3 on a Monday and a 7 on a Sunday.

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Chris: It doesn't matter. As long as the 2 people know that shared secret, it can be encrypted, it can be transferred, and it can be decrypted. Now I know what you're saying. It doesn't sound complicated, and you're right.

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Ned: Mhmm.

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Chris: But with these kinds of messages, it didn't really matter because the goal was not for it to be encrypted forever. These were messages of war. The value of the message that was encrypted would often expire very, very quickly. So say you encrypted a message that says, we will attack the left flank at dawn. It doesn't really matter if the bad guys decrypt that message the next day.

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Chris: Dawn has passed, and considering you were fighting Julius Caesar, you're probably already dead. That's fair.

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Ned: So, I

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Chris: mean, good on you for decrypting it from the grave.

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Ned: Yeah. I guess. That's quite a feat.

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Chris: Decrypting it from the crypt?

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Ned: Oh, great. Yeah. I'll take that. It's a it's a pattern that keeps repeating itself as we go through the history of cryptography. The how valuable the information is and how long it's valuable for will inform what level of protection you apply to it.

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Ned: So when we get to, like, World War 1 and World War 2, they had different levels of encryption available, and they would reserve the really difficult encryption for super important messages. And then for just regular messages, they might use a lesser encryption or a less complicated encryption.

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Chris: Right. Or a double encryption. Just do the same thing twice. Right. Which is something that we do now with computers, double and triple encryption and levels of that type of thing.

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Chris: It's Mhmm. Again, if it's comp if it if the thing is that you're waiting for the computational power to break the code, then it's gonna take twice as long to do it twice.

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Ned: Unless you find a way around it.

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Chris: Right.

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Ned: If there's a flaw in the encryption process, then it doesn't matter how many times you did it.

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Chris: Correct.

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Ned: If that flaw can be exploited, which has happened with some of the algorithms out there.

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Chris: Yes. And that's incidentally why we keep coming up with new ones.

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Ned: Mhmm.

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Chris: We always like to say that encryption is really just long numbers, long prime numbers that we divide, but it's a little more complicated than that.

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Ned: Yeah.

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Chris: But, anyway, we're still in ancient history. We're gonna fast forward again, and now we're gonna be in the middle ages.

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Ned: Oh, rent fares.

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Chris: Kind of, except it's not a fair. It's just life.

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Ned: Oh, that's fun.

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Chris: Oh, there's so much dysentery.

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Ned: What a picture to paint.

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Chris: But, anyway, you're right. I mean, we're starting to see a couple of trends emerge. Right? The secret information is being used, to is used to turn valuable information into something that outsiders can't read in increasingly complex ways. Simultaneously, all along the way, there are people that can decrypt the messages in an ever a never ending arms race.

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Ned: Mhmm.

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Chris: And I have 1 more example for you, and we will now fast forward to the 16th century

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Ned: Oh.

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Chris: And talk very briefly about 1 of the most famous encryption, decryption stories of the Middle Ages, and that is the tragic tale of Mary, Queen of Scots. Okay. Now if this was a history podcast, this would be at least 2 episodes just by itself. And 1 of the reasons that this is so interesting is that it was so incredibly well documented. Ah.

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Chris: There are chances that plenty of stories were more interesting, but high society just deleted all those records. You can't do that when 1 queen executes another queen.

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Ned: Yeah. That that does seem to leave a mark.

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Chris: So in this famous example of early modern code breaking, Mary, queen of Scots was a prisoner in all but name. I mean, I believe they actually did technically call it house arrest, but things meant different things back then. A house is a castle. Let let's not get into it. Fair.

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Chris: She was stuck Mhmm. By queen Elizabeth the first because queen Elizabeth the first wanted to stay queen. And having another queen, like, down the street was problematic.

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Ned: Could be.

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Chris: Mary had been in the state for a while, like, 20 years or something. And as she got older and stayed more, more and more constrained and more and more desperate, she started to get a little loopy, which is unfortunate. And she got absolutely tired of it. Basically, giving up on the idea that Mary was, I mean, Mary gave up on the idea that Elizabeth was ever going to release her in any way, shape, or form. Also, there were a cadre of outsiders in England who wanted to free Mary.

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Chris: And, honestly, that's not what they wanted. What they really wanted was her on the throne of England. There's a whole religious thing. Again, we're not gonna get into it. In order to plan, they started to pass her encrypted messages.

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Chris: This scheme was super complicated for the 14th century. The scheme included things like substitutions that we've talked about already, false letters, as in injecting gibberish that you know is not really part of the code but will confuse someone trying to read it, and also substituting a single letter for a whole word or phrase or vice versa. Oh. So instead of a 1 to 1 letter to letter word to word, now you're making the code different. You're using slang basically in the code.

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Chris: All of this was in the attempt to make it harder and harder and what they believed was impossible to break. Also, they came up with very clever ways of getting letters to and from Mary even though she was allegedly under house arrest and definitely the most important political prisoner who wasn't in the Tower of London.

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Ned: Okay.

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Chris: Letters were smuggled in and out using spies and a whole bunch of different mechanisms, including false bottoms on kegs of beer. Wow. That is a 1000% true and 1000% amazing. Now like I said, she'd been in there for a minute. The codes and ciphers she used varied and constantly changed over time, and some of them were actually not even fully decrypted until 2,023.

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Chris: That alone is an interesting side story. There's a link in the show notes if you wanna learn more.

[01:28:20.350]
Ned: I do, but I will do that on my own time.

[01:28:24.030]
Chris: The most important codes, unfortunately, were broken. Oh. Now it is likely, although never proven, that this was with the help of a turncoat, but Elizabeth Spiering had plenty of code breakers that were incredible at this. Linguists, mathematicians, what have you, brought all their forces to bear. They broke that code, and they read the letters until Mary incriminated herself.

[01:28:53.810]
Chris: Again, we're not gonna go through all the history, but suffice it to say, the story ends with Mary's execution. Mhmm. 1 of the reasons that this happened was, like I said, the codes that she used were good for the 14th century. Her codes were break broken in about 1583.

[01:29:12.160]
Ned: Oh, that's later.

[01:29:13.920]
Chris: Yeah. And for attribution purposes, I'm pretty sure I stole that particular zinger from, Peter Scheffler's b size presentation. So, Peter, please don't sue me again.

[01:29:24.450]
Ned: The first time was enough.

[01:29:27.410]
Chris: Now it is worth highlighting, the cleverness of these code breakers. Remember, throughout time, there's always been an arms race between the coders and the decoders. In Mary's case, even though it was a complex substitution, it was still a substitution.

[01:29:46.780]
Ned: Right.

[01:29:47.340]
Chris: So you could start to find patterns in what is called frequency analysis, which is 1 of the bedrock ways to do decryption. Simple example is to look at a scramble and say, which letter shows up the most times? That's probably e. Yep. And then you just go from there.

[01:30:09.140]
Chris: You know, this is known as the wheel of fortune theorem. We cover e, then you get r s p l and n. Yeah.

[01:30:15.780]
Ned: Yeah.

[01:30:17.300]
Chris: Now like I said, this is linguistic and mathematics, and there's a lot of complexity that goes into this, which they did by hand with a quill. And also, remember, Mary was under house arrest for nearly 20 years. So they had dozens upon dozens of letters to work with.

[01:30:36.700]
Ned: Mhmm.

[01:30:37.930]
Chris: Because, honestly, I mean, come on. Did she really think that they weren't gonna be intercepted? The false bottom to a beer keg? Eventually, someone's gonna figure that out.

[01:30:47.290]
Ned: Well, someone's gonna notice the beer keg doesn't weigh enough.

[01:30:51.820]
Chris: And incidentally, that's another reason, when we will talk about this, why higher level codes are sometimes used. We don't necessarily care if you break the intermediate or the low code. Mhmm. We do care if you break the high code. Right?

[01:31:05.410]
Chris: So we're gonna use it as little as possible to give you a small amount of information as possible to work with. Mary did not quite get that, because I think they had just invented frequency analysis, like, 10 minutes ago.

[01:31:20.010]
Ned: Yeah. There's a lot of stuff being invented in the 1500.

[01:31:23.850]
Chris: Yes. Not dysentery, though.

[01:31:27.050]
Ned: No. That's been with us for you keep bringing

[01:31:29.130]
Chris: it up. So, yeah, Mary's story is just 1 exceedingly well documented story, but it's part of that much larger tale. Cryptography obviously did not end in the 16th century. It continued to evolve, becoming more critical tool in war, in diplomacy, and eventually, our modern life. Do we remember when we had to fight people to use h t t p s?

[01:31:58.290]
Ned: Constantly.

[01:32:01.570]
Chris: So, yeah, it's similar but different. Right? Queen Elizabeth's Cobra breakers broke down Mary's codes just like today's advancements in quantum computing threatened to break down the encryption systems we rely on today.

[01:32:15.320]
Ned: Mhmm.

[01:32:17.180]
Chris: Now because I talk too much, it turns out that this is just part 1. Yes. For some reason, I thought I was gonna get through all of history, and that's just insane. That's just insane.

[01:32:30.670]
Ned: I admire your gumption.

[01:32:33.870]
Chris: So we're gonna stop here. I will revisit this. We've got 500 odd years of technology to go through from Napoleon to the Civil War to the aforementioned World War 1, the Enigma machine, public key encryption, and then oh my god. This is gonna be 3 parts, isn't it?

[01:32:53.670]
Ned: I think possibly more, Chris.

[01:32:56.230]
Chris: What have I done?

[01:32:57.910]
Ned: You did this to yourself.

[01:33:00.220]
Chris: Stay tuned for for part 2 where I just sob inconsolately for 35 minutes.

[01:33:08.700]
Ned: Oh, that's our Easter episode, everybody. It's the saddest holiday. Well, hey. Thanks for listening or something. I guess you found it worthwhile enough if you made it all the way to the end.

[01:33:20.650]
Ned: So congratulations to you, friend. You accomplished something today. Now you can go sit on a couch, whittle down a dowel rod, and write some encrypted messages on parchment paper. You've earned it. You can find more about the show by visiting our LinkedIn page.

[01:33:34.790]
Ned: Just search Chaos Lever or go to our website, chaos lever.com. Chris, did you know we actually got some episode feedback from our episode 2 weeks ago about telephone systems?

[01:33:45.800]
Chris: What's an episode?

[01:33:47.160]
Ned: Oh, it was from LinkedIn, and the gentleman said that he enjoyed the message. Not the message, the episode? That's the 1. He enjoyed it very much. I enjoyed the message very much.

[01:33:57.640]
Chris: There you go.

[01:33:58.560]
Ned: If you would like to leave feedback, you can do that via LinkedIn or through the main page, which, as I said, is chaos lever.com, where you'll find show notes, blog posts, general Tom Fulrey, and our audience survey. Hey. Please go take the audience survey. I really wanna know how awesome we are, and only you can tell me that aside from my Stuart Smalley mirror. We'll be back next week to see what fresh hell is upon us.

[01:34:21.910]
Ned: Tata for now.

[01:34:35.570]
Chris: You know what I've never been able to understand?

[01:34:38.130]
Ned: Anything?

[01:34:39.170]
Chris: Well, besides that.

[01:34:43.110]
Ned: Yes.

[01:34:43.270]
Chris: Vests.

[01:34:46.310]
Ned: What is the point of vests?

[01:34:47.670]
Chris: Why were what at what point in my life am I going to say to myself, I would like my torso to be warm, but fuck my arms.