Posts made in February, 2011

Modern Uses of Cryptography

Posted by yourlocaltechguy on Feb 28, 2011 in Articles | 0 comments

Mod­ern uses of cryp­tol­ogy dates back to World War I where the US was help­ing the British cap­ture and deci­pher mes­sages from Ger­many. At this point in the war the US had remained neu­tral. Then a telegram was inter­cepted (The Zim­mer­mann telegram) from Ger­many to Mex­ico. Basi­cally what it said was that Ger­many would divide up the US with Mex­ico if they would help in the war effort. The US ended its posi­tion of neu­tral­ity soon after.

In World War II, there were many uses of cryp­tol­ogy. The infa­mous Enigma machine used by the Ger­man mil­i­tary was one of the more famous ones. This was an electro-mechanical, portable cipher machine. It was able to encrypt and decrypt mes­sages. The Enigma machine was a com­bi­na­tion of keys, plugs and rotors cre­at­ing a com­plex mechan­i­cal machine. The Enigma was first com­mer­cial avail­able in the 1920’s. Gov­ern­ments and mil­i­tary of many nations adopted this type of cryp­tog­ra­phy. A British math­e­mati­cian, Alan Tur­ing, was able to crack the code which helped in the Allied vic­tory.  The US was also suc­cess­ful in break­ing many of the Japan­ese codes too. This lead to a win at Mid­way Island, turn­ing the war in the Pacific. Another mes­sage that was inter­cepted lead to the death of Admi­ral Yamamoto. He was sched­uled to visit a naval base in the Solomon Islands, as his plane approached it was ambushed and shot down. The US was not the only coun­try able to break codes. The Japan­ese were also able to break US codes, with the excep­tion of one. <!–more–>The Navajo lan­guage was used as a code. The lan­guage was per­fect for code because it was an unwrit­ten lan­guage and had no alpha­bet. The idea came from the use of Native Amer­i­can lan­guages in World War I. The Japan­ese were never able to crack Navajo lan­guage code. You might remem­ber the movie Windtalkers.

Are Traditional Networking and Telecommunication Systems a Dying Breed?

Posted by yourlocaltechguy on Feb 23, 2011 in Articles | 0 comments

Devel­op­ments in wire­less technologies

The new mil­len­nium has soon proved itself to be one of even more rapid and often trau­matic change than ever before.  For pro­fes­sion­als who are part of the Infor­ma­tion Age this presents a par­tic­u­lar chal­lenge.  Sys­tems are needed that would not only serve the cur­rent needs of the client, but also the chang­ing tech­no­log­i­cal needs of vast com­pa­nies and cor­po­ra­tions.  VoIP sys­tems are equipped to pro­vide this kind of ser­vice. Three trends of an ever chang­ing busi­ness world:

• IP tele­phony
• Wire­less LANs
• Inter­net security

It appears that a more favor­able out­look has replaced the neg­a­tive views of net­work­ing and secu­rity issues dur­ing 2001 and 2002.  New devel­op­ments in sev­eral net­work­ing and wire­less tech­nolo­gies have brought about this more pos­i­tive paradigm.

VoIP con­fer­ence call sys­tems for exam­ple have the capa­bil­ity to use pass­word tech­nol­ogy as a secu­rity mea­sure against intrud­ers.  Fur­ther­more fire­wall prod­ucts have been inte­grated in terms of the abil­ity to open ports dynam­i­cally.  VoIP requires more than sta­tic port assign­ments, and of course secu­rity mea­sures must be suf­fi­cient to cover its dynamic nature.  In terms of secu­rity then, the devel­op­ments in the field appear to remain on track with new tech­nol­ogy.  In the future cen­tral­ized man­age­ment pol­icy may form part of secu­rity technology.

Cryptography & Encryption: What is it and Why is it used?

Posted by yourlocaltechguy on Feb 21, 2011 in Articles | 0 comments

In this three part series I plan on explor­ing cryp­tog­ra­phy and the his­tory of cryp­tog­ra­phy. Cryp­tog­ra­phy is such a broad part of our lives we do not even notice the small­est appli­ca­tions, shop­ping on eBay or watch­ing satel­lite tele­vi­sion.  I bet you even used cryp­tol­ogy when you were in school and did not even know it. Ever write a mes­sage in num­bers instead of let­ters? Each let­ter of the alpha­bet cor­re­lated to its num­ber posi­tion in the alpha­bet. The num­ber sequence 3,16,25,12,20,15,12,15,7,25 equals cryp­tol­ogy. This is a form of cryp­tol­ogy in its most basic form.

Webster’s dic­tio­nary defines Cryp­tog­ra­phy as :
n.    1.    The act or art of writ­ing in code or secret char­ac­ters; also, secret char­ac­ters, codes or ciphers, or mes­sages writ­ten in a secret code.
2.    The sci­ence which stud­ies meth­ods for encod­ing mes­sages so that they can be read only by a per­son who knows the secret infor­ma­tion required for decod­ing, called the key; it includes crypt­analy­sis, the sci­ence of decod­ing encrypted mes­sages with­out pos­sess­ing the proper key, and has sev­eral other branches; see for exam­ple steganography.

What is Voice over IP?

Posted by yourlocaltechguy on Feb 18, 2011 in Articles | 0 comments

Voice over Inter­net Pro­to­col, or VoIP, as it is also known, is a com­bi­na­tion of tele­phonic tech­nol­ogy with Inter­net appli­ca­tions.  This rapidly advanc­ing tech­nique is used in a num­ber of appli­ca­tions, includ­ing desk­top IP phones, mobile VoIP-enabled hand­held devices, and gate­ways. (Skype , Von­age etc) What is par­tic­u­larly remark­able about the growth of the voice over IP indus­try is the fact that the Inter­net was orig­i­nally designed for pur­poses not related to voice communications.

Indeed, voice com­mu­ni­ca­tions were han­dled effec­tively by pub­lic switched tele­phone net­works (PSTNs) and cel­lu­lar net­works.  The very nature of the Inter­net used as it was for asyn­chro­nous data com­mu­ni­ca­tion made it unfa­vor­able for the voice com­mu­ni­ca­tions indus­try.  Other fac­tors play­ing a role in this include the loss and retrans­mis­sion of data pack­ets and no spe­cific band­width ded­i­cated for each user.  Unlike tele­phonic net­works such as PSTNs and the cel­lu­lar indus­try, the Inter­net is not con­trolled by a sin­gle cen­tral­ized entity for coor­di­na­tion pur­poses.  Real-time com­mu­ni­ca­tion ser­vices pow­ered by the Inter­net should thus prove highly unlikely or at the very least challenging.