Crypto History & Future: From 500 BC to Quantum Computing 🚀

Interesting Facts and History of Crypto:

Many developers have a just-keep-HTTPS-working understanding of cryptography, and would like to learn more. This talk starts with the simplest (and oldest) forms of secret communication: from the first invisible ink, to the ancient "scytale" anagram tool, to Caesar ciphers used in ancient Greece and Rome. These simple techniques give an accessible introduction to fundamental aspects of all cryptographic systems thru-out history. In particular, the establishment of a secure "key-exchange", which will be shown thru-out the talk to be the most important and practical knowledge for developers. From those ancient foundations, it *explores the evolution of cryptography over centuries of"battle" between code-makers and code-breakers*: from frequency cryptanalysis of the Islamic Golden Age, to the Alberti Cipher Disk and the Vigenère Square used in Renaissance and pre-Industrial Europe, to the World War II stories of making and breaking the Enigma machine - the first popular use of electromechanical cryptography, and the pre-cursors to modern computers.

Coming into contemporary times, it *covers the development of computer cryptography*: from the "Lucifer" cipher that would become the Data Encryption Standard (DES), to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) used today in protocols like TLS/HTTPS, along with modern key-exchange protocols like RSA, Diffie-Hellman, and Elliptic Curve. It even introduces Supersingularisogeny Diffie–Hellman key exchange (SIDH): a post-quantum algorithm designed to resist cryptanalytic attack by an adversary in possession of a quantum computer! The talk concludes with practical advice for developers, especially for secret key generation, distribution, and exchange.

About Luke Crouch: I'm a Privacy & Security Engineer for Mozilla Firefox. I've also been a web developer for 15 years. I enjoy learning and presenting about "exotic" technologies and making them accessible to wider audiences.