Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age

Each cryptological advance that was made outside the confines of the NSA's Fort Meade complex was met with increasing legislative and judicial resistance. Levy's storytelling acumen tugs the reader along through mathematical and legal hassles that would stop most narratives in their tracks--his words make even the depressingly silly Clipper chip fiasco vibrant. Hardcore privacy nerds will value Crypto as a review of 30 years of wrangling; those readers with less familiarity with the subject will find it a terrific and well-documented launching pad for further research. From notables like Phil Zimmerman to obscure but important figures like James Ellis, Crypto dishes the dirt on folks who know how to keep a secret. --Rob Lightner

Product Description
If you've ever made a secure purchase with your credit card over the Internet, then you have seen cryptography, or "crypto," in action. From Steven Levy-the author who made "hackers" a household word-comes this account of a revolution that is already affecting every citizen in the twenty-first century. Crypto tells the inside story of how a group of "crypto rebels"-nerds and visionaries turned freedom fighters-teamed up with corporate interests to beat Big Brother and ensure our privacy on the Internet. Levy's history of one of the most controversial and important topics of the digital age reads like the best futuristic fiction.

"Gripping and illuminating." (The Wall Street Journal)

Encryption truly is one of the most critical technologies necessary for a smoothly functioning virtual world, and is very much the case that the U.S. Federal Government successfully delayed the general availability of strong encryption for at least a decade. (Future economists may point back to the last two decades of the 20th century and show how this failed government policy was responsible for the loss of U.S. dominance in the high-tech market.)

It would have been easy to take the politically correct road and portray the Feds as being evil conspirators, bent on maintaining their own power and pride at the expense of the entire world. Levy chooses a more balanced approach, depicting the NSA in nearly heroic terms. He is especially sympathetic towards Clint Brooks (a name I did not know), an NSA lifer who developed the key escrow concept as a compromise that would allow widespread public utilization of strong encryption while still allowing law enforcement (and of course, intelligence agencies), the ability to intercept communications under controlled circumstances. If both the NSA and their philosophical opponents are heroes with noble goals, a tragic ending is inevitable, which adds an element of pathos to this triumph of democracy.

As a former software vendor, I've been totally frustrated by both the crypto export laws and by the NSA attitude of "If you only knew what we knew, you wouldn't even ask that question." That argument turned out to be just as specious now as everyone thought it was at the time, but the marvelous aspect of this book is that Levy is able to make a cynic like me accept that the people within the Puzzle Palace have legitimate motivations. (He is much harsher on the FBI, and creates an especially unflattering portrayal of Louie Freeh). It's a well-balanced approach to a very contentious subject, which adds considerably to the author's credibility.

Personalities loom large in a history like this one, and Levy is a master at drawing them out of their personal shells and detailing aspects of their private lives to explain their motivations and feelings. Whitfield Diffie is the old master who had the vision to conceive of a new model for encryption that would meet the unprecedented needs of a network society. Ron Rivest was the energy behind the development of the most significant public key algorithm, created by an unlikely trio of inventors. Jim Bidzos was a young playboy who found the commercialization of the RSA technology to be the challenge he needed in his hitherto shallow life of world travel, hot cars and fast women. Like Diffie, Phil Zimmerman marches to a drummer that only he can hear, yet this amateur programmer succeeded in popularizing strong encryption long before RSA and its millions in venture cap money did. Given his ten years of personal research and interviews of the people he chronicles, Levy's will probably be the definitive written account on many of these quirky visionaries.

The book is a quick read, but a good one. Technically, it is very accurate, with one unfortunate mistake on page 178 where it reads "Then he uses the hash function to recreate Alice's message from the digest..." Hash functions are 1-way functions, and cannot be reversed. If it read instead, "Then he uses the hash function to recreate Alice's message digest..." it would be more accurate. In order to verify a digital signature, the encrypted hash value provided by the sender is decrypted by their public key, which is then compared to another hash value generated by the verifying party (see p. 38 of "Applied Cryptography, 2nd Edition" by Bruce Schneier). Other than this confusion over how digital signatures are verified, the book does an excellent job of presenting the concepts of public key encryption to a non-technical reader. Besides being an enjoyable tale of business and technology history, this book could also be considered an executive-level introduction to the need for encryption on the Internet and the ways in which modern implementations provide it.

If you want to know what is happening when that little lock icon at the bottom of your web browser closes, you'll find a conceptual answer in this book. You'll not only learn the sequence of events that led to the development of SSL, but you'll also read the history of the first successful attempt to crack SSL security, and its significance to you as a customer of sites like Amazon. "Crypto" should appeal not only to those who are interested in the history of technology, but anyone wanting to understand more about the history and personal and commercial use of encryption on the Internet. Anyone involved in an e-commerce project or with an interest in information security would find this an interesting and accessible book. It is not a technology book per se, but I think most technically-oriented people will enjoy reading about how people like them had the drive and vision to change the world-especially when the odds were so heavily stacked against them.

This is a compelling and important story that needs to be told and understood. Levy is neither the first to undertake this telling, and undoubtedly won't be the last, but I'm convinced that this will become a classic of technology history-even more so than his earlier books. His thoroughness, extensive research, and evenhanded approach will make this book an important source for future researchers.


Goes "Behind the Firewall" for an Insider's Account   January 18, 2001
Steve Hardiman (Washington, DC, USA)
9 out of 10 found this review helpful

Riveting true stories that are well researched. Levy weaves an intriguing account of cryptography's "eccentric patriots" and their dedication to the craft. It is primarily a story of people and the government politics that tried to ensnare them, not a treatise on ciphers and hashing algorithms. Explanations of cryptography are lucid, even if math wasn't your best subject.

It's an excellent addition to American historical literature that we've sorely lacked after 50 years of Cold War stifled journalists from reporting details about anything that might threaten national security.

Non-fiction literature buffs and researchers will appreciate the copious endnotes, glossary, and index. While it also includes an extensive bibliography, Levy conducted many interviews to write this original work.


Excellent short history on the human side of pub. key crypto   April 30, 2001
Marcelo P. Lima (Miami, FL USA)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful

This easy-to-ready short history by writer Steven Levy, who has written numerous articles for Wired, is a very well-researched volume on the human side of public-key cryptography.

Levy has interviewed all of the major players: Diffie, Adleman, Chaum, Zimmerman, and others; he's done nearly a decade of research on the subject, and monitored the sci.crypt.* newsgroups. Clearly, this is an authoritative account of the short 30-year history of public key.

The main theme of the book is how the NSA tried to stifle new developments by the researchers, placing secrecy orders and classifying their patents and papers. Throughout the book, as Levy draws out the characters, it's the crypto community vs. the government, until ultimately the cypherpunks win out.

This book doesn't contain a single diagram; no photos, and no equations at all. So if you're looking for a technical introduction to crypto, look elsewhere; this is purely an informally-written account on the people behind the scenes.

Five stars, for what it is; sure, Levy writes with magazine-style prose, but this fits the high-level view he takes on the subject. Most importantly, this volume was exhaustively researched and has the collaboration of all of the key players, which lends Levy's account great credibility.


A Telling History of Cryptography   April 22, 2002
5 out of 5 found this review helpful

Cryptography has become one of the most important technologies in a secure digital world. It makes possible digital signatures, protection of confidential information, protection against tampering--or at least provides notification that tampering has occurred--and secure authentication of users. In an age when the simplest security breeches of highly visible dot-coms makes the front page of the popular press, cryptography and related technologies are making their ways into almost all of the software products we use daily.

But it's easy to forget that only recently did cryptography become available for non-government users. Reaching this point was a long and hard battle with what used to be the most secret of government organizations, the National Security Agency (NSA). Bit by bit, researchers outside the agency made fundamental discoveries that eroded NSA's ability to control cryptography. Until finally the government was forced to come to terms with the digital age where the secrets could make their way around the globe in seconds.

This is the story that Steven Levy tells. Although the book tends to portray researchers outside the NSA as skillful and lucky heroes, and those inside the NSA as pompous but brilliant ideologues, it's a compelling story. The book is roughly chronological, starting with Whit Diffie's independent discovery of public key cryptography, one of the major breakthroughs that made the field feasible, the story of RSA, the ill-fated Clipper chip, and concessions the NSA was forced into against overwhelming pressure.

The author outlines the development of a people's cryptography and its collision with the U.S. government. The book is about privacy in the information age and about the people who saw many years ago that the Internet's greatest virtue was its greatest drawback: free access to information that leads to a loss of privacy.

From a developer's standpoint, the story is interesting because it explains many of the features of cryptography as we know it today, making it easier to put them to efficient use. For example, what was the big deal with keys longer than 40-bits that the government restricted them from export? And just how much safer are 128-bit keys? Sure, we all have heard the number of hours or millennia today's computers take to break such keys, but why those specific numbers?

As with most complex controversies, both the government and the outsiders make compelling arguments for their case. Cryptography has long been the province of governments, and wars have been won and lost on the success of keeping secrets secret. But in a demographic society, individual privacy is almost sacrosanct, even though it is not explicitly guaranteed in any of the documents on which the U.S. is founded. Crypto tells the story of how these conflicting interests have been sorted out to the current state of affairs.


Levy Strikes Again   January 13, 2001
4 out of 4 found this review helpful

If you liked Hackers, you'll love Crypto. It's written in the same spirit, celebrating cryptographers in the same way Levy celebrated hackers, and along the way makes a really strong case for private freedoms over government intervention. It's a great story, very newsworthy, and Levy really knows his stuff. And if you haven't read Hackers, try that one, too. You won't be disappointed!