Neal Koblitz is a mathematician who, starting in the 1980s, became fascinated by mathematical questions in cryptography. In his article "The Uneasy Relationship Between Mathematics and Cryptography," ...

One influential image that is popular among scientists is the view that mathematics is the language of nature. The present article discusses another possible way to approach the relation between ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That’s because certain hard math problems underpin the ...

If you’ve ever picked up a war novel, you know they tend to deal with the exploits of soldiers and sailors, the dirt and danger of the front lines. Not Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon.” This ...

Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That’s because certain hard math problems underpin the security of modern encryption. Any clever trick for solving them ...

For thousands of years, if you wanted to send a secret message, there was basically one way to do it. You’d scramble the message using a special rule, known only to you and your intended audience.

Author Nick Sullivan worked for six years at Apple on many of its most important cryptography efforts before recently joining CloudFlare, where he is a systems engineer. He has a degree in mathematics ...

Before we move into the meat of this article, let’s define a couple terms related to cryptography. The syllable crypt may make you think of tombs, but it comes from a Greek word that means “hidden” or ...

Cryptography is just about as old as written communication itself, and mathematics has long supplied methods for the cryptographic toolbox. Starting in the 1970s, increasingly sophisticated ...