How Does Math Keep Our Secrets?
Alan Turing helped the Allies in World War II by cracking the Nazis’ “unbreakable” Enigma cipher. But if Turing had attempted to decrypt those messages simply by trying out all possibilities, the sun would die out before he was done. How did Turing crack the "unbreakable" code? And now in the digital age, how do we keep generating encryptions of seemingly impossible complexity to keep our information secure? On this week’s episode of “The Joy of Why,” co-host Janna Levin talks with computer scientist Barak Boaz about the mind-bending mathematics of cryptography.
The Joy of Why · Steven Strogatz, Janna Levin and Quanta Magazine
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Show Notes
Can you keep a secret? Modern techniques for maintaining the confidentiality of information are based on mathematical problems that are inherently too difficult for anyone to solve without the right hints. Yet what does that mean when quantum computers capable of solving many problems astronomically faster are on the horizon? In this episode, host Janna Levin talks with computer scientist Boaz Barak about the cryptographic techniques that keep information confidential, and why “security through mathematics” beats “security through obscurity.”