DevOps Articles

They Who Control Encryption

If you’ve seen The Imitation Game, or studied computer science in school, you have likely heard of Enigma, Alan Turing, or some of the other advances in cryptography that took place during the Second World War. One of the major contributing factors to cryptography becoming a discipline within the public domain was Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman’s invention of public-key cryptography in 1976.

The project was successful in cracking the encryption that safeguarded the majority of global commerce and banking systems at the time. The project was wide and deep, but it employed simple methods such as gaining access to a user’s device before encryption and transmission of a message even took place.

In 2020, senate bill 4051 makes an attempt: To improve the ability of law enforcement agencies to access encrypted data, and for other purposes.