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Hugo Koch
Hugo Alexander Koch (9 March 1870, Delft – 3 March 1928, Düsseldorf) was a Dutch inventor who conceived of and patented an idea for machine encryption, the rotor machine, although he was not the first to do so. He is sometimes erroneously credited as the originator of the Enigma machine; this has been shown instead to be the work of German engineer Arthur Scherbius. Koch filed for his rotor machine patent on 7 October 1919, and was granted Netherlands patent 10,700 (equivalent to ), held by Naamloze Vennootschap Ingenieursbureau Securitas in Amsterdam. No machine was built from his patents, and, in 1927, he assigned the rights to Arthur Scherbius, the inventor of the Enigma machine. Scherbius had developed the idea of rotor machine encryption independently from Koch, and had filed for his own patent in 1918. Bauer (1999) writes that Scherbius bought Koch's patents "obviously not because he did not own patents before; presumably he wanted to protect his patents". See also * ...
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Delft
Delft () is a List of cities in the Netherlands by province, city and Municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality in the Provinces of the Netherlands, province of South Holland, Netherlands. It is located between Rotterdam, to the southeast, and The Hague, to the northwest. Together with them, it is a part of both the Rotterdam–The Hague metropolitan area and the Randstad. Delft is a popular tourist destination in the Netherlands, famous for its historical connections with the reigning House of Orange-Nassau, for its Delftware, blue pottery, for being home to the painter Johannes Vermeer, Jan Vermeer, and for hosting Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). Historically, Delft played a highly influential role in the Dutch Golden Age. In terms of science and technology, thanks to the pioneering contributions of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and Martinus Beijerinck, Delft can be considered to be the birthplace of microbiology. History Early history The city of Delft came int ...
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Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf is the capital city of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state of Germany. It is the second-largest city in the state after Cologne and the List of cities in Germany with more than 100,000 inhabitants, seventh-largest city in Germany, with a 2022 population of 629,047. The Düssel, from which the city and the borough of Düsseltal take their name, divides into four separate branches within the city, each with its own mouth into the Rhine (Lower Rhine). Most of Düsseldorf lies on the right bank of the Rhine, and the city has grown together with Neuss, Ratingen, Meerbusch, Erkrath and Monheim am Rhein. Düsseldorf is the central city of the metropolitan region Rhine-Ruhr, the List of EU metropolitan regions by GDP#2021 ranking of top four German metropolitan regions, second biggest metropolitan region by GDP in the European Union, that stretches from Bonn via Cologne and Düsseldorf to the Ruhr (from Duisburg via Essen to Dortmund). The ''-dorf'' suffix mea ...
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Encryption
In Cryptography law, cryptography, encryption (more specifically, Code, encoding) is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plaintext, into an alternative form known as ciphertext. Despite its goal, encryption does not itself prevent interference but denies the intelligible content to a would-be interceptor. For technical reasons, an encryption scheme usually uses a pseudo-random encryption Key (cryptography), key generated by an algorithm. It is possible to decrypt the message without possessing the key but, for a well-designed encryption scheme, considerable computational resources and skills are required. An authorized recipient can easily decrypt the message with the key provided by the originator to recipients but not to unauthorized users. Historically, various forms of encryption have been used to aid in cryptography. Early encryption ...
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Rotor Machine
In cryptography, a rotor machine is an electro-mechanical stream cipher device used for encrypting and decrypting messages. Rotor machines were the cryptographic state-of-the-art for much of the 20th century; they were in widespread use from the 1920s to the 1970s. The most famous example is the German Enigma machine, the output of which was deciphered by the Allies during World War II, producing intelligence code-named '' Ultra''. Description The primary component of a rotor machine is a set of ''rotors'', also termed ''wheels'' or ''drums'', which are rotating disks with an array of electrical contacts on either side. The wiring between the contacts implements a fixed substitution of letters, replacing them in some complex fashion. On its own, this would offer little security; however, before or after encrypting each letter, the rotors advance positions, changing the substitution. By this means, a rotor machine produces a complex polyalphabetic substitution cipher, whic ...
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Enigma Machine
The Enigma machine is a cipher device developed and used in the early- to mid-20th century to protect commercial, diplomatic, and military communication. It was employed extensively by Nazi Germany during World War II, in all branches of the Wehrmacht, German military. The Enigma machine was considered so secure that it was used to encipher the most top-secret messages. The Enigma has an electromechanical Rotor machine, rotor mechanism that scrambles the 26 letters of the alphabet. In typical use, one person enters text on the Enigma's keyboard and another person writes down which of the 26 lights above the keyboard illuminated at each key press. If plaintext is entered, the illuminated letters are the ciphertext. Entering ciphertext transforms it back into readable plaintext. The rotor mechanism changes the electrical connections between the keys and the lights with each keypress. The security of the system depends on machine settings that were generally changed daily, based ...
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Arthur Scherbius
Arthur Scherbius (30 October 1878 – 13 May 1929) was a German electrical engineer who invented the mechanical cipher Enigma machine. He patented the invention and later sold the machine under the brand name Enigma. Scherbius offered unequalled opportunities and showed the importance of cryptography to both military and civil intelligence. Biography Early life and work Scherbius was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His father was a businessman. He studied electrical engineering at the Technical University Munich and then went on to study at the Leibniz University Hannover, finishing in March 1903. The next year he completed a dissertation entitled "Proposal for the Construction of an Indirect Water Turbine Governor" and was awarded a doctorate in engineering (Dr.-Eng.). Career Scherbius subsequently worked for a number of electrical firms in Germany and Switzerland. In 1918 he founded the firm of Scherbius & Ritter. He made a number of inventions including asynchrono ...
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Netherlands
, Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The Netherlands consists of Provinces of the Netherlands, twelve provinces; it borders Germany to the east and Belgium to the south, with a North Sea coastline to the north and west. It shares Maritime boundary, maritime borders with the United Kingdom, Germany, and Belgium. The official language is Dutch language, Dutch, with West Frisian language, West Frisian as a secondary official language in the province of Friesland. Dutch, English_language, English, and Papiamento are official in the Caribbean Netherlands, Caribbean territories. The people who are from the Netherlands is often referred to as Dutch people, Dutch Ethnicity, Ethnicity group, not to be confused by the language. ''Netherlands'' literally means "lower countries" i ...
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Amsterdam
Amsterdam ( , ; ; ) is the capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, largest city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It has a population of 933,680 in June 2024 within the city proper, 1,457,018 in the City Region of Amsterdam, urban area and 2,480,394 in the Amsterdam metropolitan area, metropolitan area. Located in the Provinces of the Netherlands, Dutch province of North Holland, Amsterdam is colloquially referred to as the "Venice of the North", for its canals of Amsterdam, large number of canals, now a World Heritage Site, UNESCO World Heritage Site. Amsterdam was founded at the mouth of the Amstel River, which was dammed to control flooding. Originally a small fishing village in the 12th century, Amsterdam became a major world port during the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century, when the Netherlands was an economic powerhouse. Amsterdam was the leading centre for finance and trade, as well as a hub of secular art production. In the 19th ...
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Edward Hebern
Edward Hugh Hebern (April 23, 1869 – February 10, 1952) was an early inventor of rotor machines, devices for encryption. Background Edward Hugh Hebern was born in Streator, Illinois, on April 23, 1869. His parents were Charles and Rosanna (Rosy) Hebern. They met in Harris County, Texas while Charles was serving as guard and escort from the civil war. On February 4, 1866, they married in Harris, Texas. Rosanna was only fifteen years old. After mustering out of the service on May 29, 1866, Charles and his new wife returned to Springfield, Illinois, and on June 18, 1866, he received his final pay and discharge. Edward had an older sister, Arizona (Zoa) born in 1867, two younger brothers, Daniel Boone Hebern, born on February 17, 1871, and William Hebern, born April 8, 1875, in Houston, Texas, as well as a younger sister, Nellie Hebern, born in 1874. At the age of 6, on August 4, 1875, Edward Hugh and three of his siblings were admitted to the Illinois Soldiers’ and Sailors’ ho ...
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Arvid Damm
Arvid Gerhard Damm (7 August 1869 – 7 November 1928) was a Swedish engineer and inventor. He designed a number of cipher machines, and was one of the early inventors of the wired rotor principle for machine encipherment. The company, AB Cryptograph, was an early predecessor of Crypto AG. Biography Originally a textile engineer, he was headmaster of a weaving school in Borås, Sweden, before moving to Finland to work as a manager of a textile factory. Although already married with a son, he fell in love with a circus performer from Hungary whose opposition to a relationship he overcame by arranging a sham civil wedding ceremony in 1900 with an officiant and two witnesses. His new “wife”, with whom he then the lived for 19 years, only became aware of the situation when Damm found a new romantic interest and wanted a divorce. After a long and acrimonious legal battle, in which he denied ever being married to her and accused her of being a spy, he was ordered to pay alimony ...
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Friedrich L Bauer
Friedrich Ludwig "Fritz" Bauer (10 June 1924 – 26 March 2015) was a German pioneer of computer science and professor at the Technical University of Munich. Life Bauer earned his Abitur in 1942 and served in the Wehrmacht during World War II, from 1943 to 1945. From 1946 to 1950, he studied mathematics and theoretical physics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. Bauer received his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) under the supervision of Fritz Bopp for his thesis ''Gruppentheoretische Untersuchungen zur Theorie der Spinwellengleichungen'' ("Group-theoretic investigations of the theory of spin wave equations") in 1952. He completed his habilitation thesis ''Über quadratisch konvergente Iterationsverfahren zur Lösung von algebraischen Gleichungen und Eigenwertproblemen'' ("On quadratically convergent iteration methods for solving algebraic equations and eigenvalue problems") in 1954 at the Technical University of Munich. After teaching as a ''privatdozent'' at the Ludwi ...
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David Kahn (writer)
David Kahn (February 7, 1930 – January 23, 2024) was an American historian, journalist, and writer. He wrote extensively on the history of cryptography and military intelligence. Kahn's first published book, '' The Codebreakers - The Story of Secret Writing'' (1967), has been widely considered to be a definitive account of the history of cryptography. Biography David Kahn was born in New York City to Florence Abraham Kahn, a glass manufacturer, and Jesse Kahn, a lawyer, and grew up in Great Neck, NY on Long Island. Kahn said he traced his interest in cryptography to reading Fletcher Pratt's '' Secret and Urgent'' (1939) as a boy. Kahn was a founding editor of the '' Cryptologia'' journal. In 1969, Kahn married Susanne Fiedler; they divorced in 1994. They have two sons, Oliver and Michael.* Kahn attended Bucknell University. After graduation, he worked as a reporter at ''Newsday''. He also served as an editor at the ''International Herald Tribune'' in Paris in the 1960 ...
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