Timeline of cryptography

Below is a timeline of notable events related to cryptography.

B.C.

1–1799 A.D.

1800–1899

1900–1949

1950–1999

  • 1951  U.S. National Security Agency founded. KL-7 rotor machine introduced sometime thereafter.
  • 1957  First production order for KW-26 electronic encryption system.
  • 1964  David Kahn's The Codebreakers is published.
  • August 1964  Gulf of Tonkin Incident leads U.S. into Vietnam War, possibly due to misinterpretation of signals intelligence by NSA.
  • 1968  John Anthony Walker walks into the Soviet Union's embassy in Washington and sells information on KL-7 cipher machine. The Walker spy ring operates until 1985.
  • 1969  The first hosts of ARPANET, Internet's ancestor, are connected.
  • 1970  Using quantum states to encode information is first proposed: Stephen Wiesner invents conjugate coding and applies it to design “money physically impossible to counterfeit” (still technologically unfeasible today).
  • 1974?  Horst Feistel develops Feistel network block cipher design.
  • 1976  The Data Encryption Standard published as an official Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) for the United States.
  • 1976  Diffie and Hellman publish New Directions in Cryptography.
  • 1977  RSA public key encryption invented.
  • 1978  Robert McEliece invents the McEliece cryptosystem, the first asymmetric encryption algorithm to use randomization in the encryption process.
  • 1981  Richard Feynman proposed quantum computers. The main application he had in mind was the simulation of quantum systems, but he also mentioned the possibility of solving other problems.
  • 1984  Based on Stephen Wiesner's idea from the 1970s, Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard design the first quantum cryptography protocol, BB84.
  • 1985  Walker spy ring uncovered. Remaining KL-7's withdrawn from service.
  • 1986  After an increasing number of break-ins to government and corporate computers, United States Congress passes the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which makes it a crime to break into computer systems. The law, however, does not cover juveniles.
  • 1988  African National Congress uses computer-based one-time pads to build a network inside South Africa.
  • 1989  Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau built the prototype system which became the World Wide Web at CERN.
  • 1989  Quantum cryptography experimentally demonstrated in a proof-of-the-principle experiment by Charles Bennett et al.
  • 1991  Phil Zimmermann releases the public key encryption program PGP along with its source code, which quickly appears on the Internet.
  • 1994  Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography is published.
  • 1994  Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption protocol released by Netscape.
  • 1994  Peter Shor devises an algorithm which lets quantum computers determine the factorization of large integers quickly. This is the first interesting problem for which quantum computers promise a significant speed-up, and it therefore generates a lot of interest in quantum computers.
  • 1994  DNA computing proof of concept on toy travelling salesman problem; a method for input/output still to be determined.
  • 1994  Russian crackers siphon $10 million from Citibank and transfer the money to bank accounts around the world. Vladimir Levin, the 30-year-old ringleader, uses his work laptop after hours to transfer the funds to accounts in Finland and Israel. Levin stands trial in the United States and is sentenced to three years in prison. Authorities recover all but $400,000 of the stolen money.
  • 1994  Formerly proprietary, but un-patented, RC4 cipher algorithm is published on the Internet.
  • 1994  First RSA Factoring Challenge from 1977 is decrypted as The Magic Words are Squeamish Ossifrage.
  • 1995  NSA publishes the SHA1 hash algorithm as part of its Digital Signature Standard.
  • July 1997  OpenPGP specification (RFC 2440) released
  • 1997  Ciphersaber, an encryption system based on RC4 that is simple enough to be reconstructed from memory, is published on Usenet.
  • October 1998  Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) becomes law in U.S., criminalizing production and dissemination of technology that can circumvent technical measures taken to protect copyright.
  • October 1999  DeCSS, a computer program capable of decrypting content on a DVD, is published on the Internet.

2000 and beyond

See also

References

  1. Sumner Lemon (2 May 2007). "Digg bends to users' will on AACS encryption key". InfoWorld. Retrieved 13 November 2016.
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