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cryptology

Making and breaking codes at the NSA museum

FORT MEADE, Md.--For anyone with even the vaguest sense of the history of World War II, the term "Enigma" should hold some special meaning.

That, of course, was the name of the encryption device the Germans used to such great success during the first years of the war, allowing them to pass messages without worry of their being decrypted by the Allies.

But when the Allies finally solved the mystery of the Enigma, it turned the course of the war. The Germans were no longer able to stay ahead of the Allies and were no longer able … Read more

British researcher cracks crypto problem

A British researcher has helped put into practice an encryption scheme that could better protect sensitive data while it is being used in systems such as health care computing.

The scheme involves fully homomorphic encryption, an approach that allows computation to be performed on encrypted data without the need to decrypt the data, according to Nigel Smart, professor of cryptology in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol.

Last year, IBM researcher Craig Gentry came up with the first homomorphic scheme, which allowed simultaneous add and multiply operations on encrypted values, called ciphertexts.