Cryptography – From Ancient Freemasonry to Quantum Computing

Introduction

Worthy knights, this is my first attempt at a masonic lecture so please take it easy on me. As many of you know my whole career has been spent building computers and networks or these days its less about the building but more about managing the younger people who work on computers and networks.

I’ve always wanted to write a masonic lecture since listening to John Ashby first delivery of a light hearted look at free masonry and David Rodgers excellent organ music of the ages. But problem is this – how on earth do I give a lecture with a masonic theme that is relevant to my passion and life in modern day computing.

After months of thinking I almost gave up trying to find a link, then in June an email landed in my inbox regarding quantum computing, the headline was intriguing and the more I read the article and the more we discussed the topic in the office the more I wanted to understand the message behind the headline – What is safe in quantum computing.

Digging deeper I ended up on the journey I’m about to take you on where hopefully you will learn a little bit more about the technology we take for granted and the links between masonry and modern day computing and finally where we could end up in the not too distant future.

So what is Cryptography and what are the links to Free Masonry

The dictionary definition of cryptography is the science or study of the techniques of secret writing, especially code and cipher systems, methods, and the like. Cryptanalysis defines the procedures, processes, methods, etc., of making and using secret writing, as codes or ciphers.

So here in the Oxford English Dictionary we form our first tenuous links with masonry, i.e. we are not a secret society, we are a society with some secrets and as we protect our secrets from the un-instructed and popular world who are not masons cyphers naturally became part of our world. Or should I say the rest of the world assumed they were.

As we all know nowadays they could not be further from the truth as we journey through the history of cryptography there are definitely links that suggest on occasions there may be the odd shred of evidence to back their claims.

So where did it all start

It is believed that the oldest known text to contain one of the essential components of cryptography, a modification of the text, occurred some 4000 years ago in the Egyptian town of MENET KHUFU where the hieroglyphic inscriptions on the tomb of the nobleman KHNUMHOTEP II were written with a number of unusual symbols to confuse or obscure the meaning of the inscriptions.

EXAMPLE 1

In 7th Century BC the SPARTANS, a warrior society famed for their austere lifestyle, bravery, and skill in battle, developed a cryptographic device to send and receive secret messages between armies. This device, a cylinder called a SCYTALE, was in the possession of both the sender and the recipient of the message. To prepare the message, a narrow strip of parchment or leather, much like a modern-day paper streamer, was wound around the SCYTALE and the message was written across it. Once unwound, for transport to the receiver, the tape displayed only a sequence of meaningless letters until it was re-wound onto a SCYTALE of exactly the same diameter. The code, produced by unwinding the tape, was known as a TRANSPOSITION cypher, that is, one where the letters remain the same but the order is changed.

EXAMPLE 2

Around the 500-600 BC the AtBASH cipher came into being so named after the first, last, second and second to last letter in the Hebrew alphabet. Examples of this coded cipher actually appear in the biblical scriptures. In Jeremiah chapter 25 verse 26 It states “The King of Seshach shall drink after them” – Seshach decoded using the AtBash cipher translate to Babylon.

EXAMPLE 3

Around the time of Julius Caeser, techniques such as the ADDITIVE/SUBSTITUTION cypher began to appear, in fact there is evidence to say that Julius himself used such ciphers in his own personal communications. Additive / Substitution ciphers were encoded by substituting the letter in the text by one that is three positions to the right. A became D, V became Y etc, so as long as the receiver knew which value was being used as the substitution values he can decode the message.

EXAMPLE 4

At this point in the timeline whilst we still are at the ancient phase I would like to mention King Solomon, whilst from a masonic perspective we all know his relation to the building of the 1st temple , there is much confusion as to what is often called “King Solomon’s Key” or the “Key of King Solomon” as if this is indeed as key to decoding some form of Cipher, this made all the more intriguing with Dan Browns recent book which exploits the links between Freemasonry and King Solomon’s secrets. From the research I have managed to obtain the term King Solomons Key is a reference to a 14th / 15th century Grimware (roughly translated as a book of magic or incantations for summoning spirits - part populated by symbolism (which to many may have put two and two together and came out with 5).

To Quote Wikipedia –

The Key of Solomon is divided into two books According to the mythical history of the document, as recorded in its introduction, Solomon supposedly wrote the book for his son Rehoboam, and commanded him to hide the book in his sepulcher upon his death. After many years the book was discovered by a group of Babylonian philosophers repairing Solomon's tomb. None could interpret the text, until one of them, Iohé Grevis, suggested that they should entreat the Lord for understanding. The Angel of the Lord appeared to him and extracted a promise that he would keep the text hidden from the unworthy and the wicked, after which he was able to read it plainly. Iohé Grevis then placed a conjuration on the book that the unworthy, the unwise or those who did not fear God would not attain the desired effect from any of the workings contained therein.

So in summary I see no direct evidence of a special link to King Solomon’s secrets and masonry via a special encryption code but can fully understand how Masonry’s close ties with the temple could suggest a stronger link than is actual there, especially when you see some of the symbolism used within the book

EXAMPLE 5

Things pretty much stayed as they were with no major developments in cryptography until in an essay written in 1466, an Italian LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI (who is often called the ‘father of western cryptography’), described the construction of a cypher disk, founding the concept of POLY ALPHABETIC cyphers

A poly alphabetic cipher is substitution cipher but using more alphabets at the same time

EXAMPLE 6

Although he had made the most important advance in cryptography in at least five hundred years, he did not develop his concept. It was left for others, the best known being the French cryptographer BLAISE DE VIGENERE to devise a practical poly alphabetic system which bears his name, the VIGENERE SQUARE. At the time, and for a considerable time afterwards this technique was believed to be unbreakable

That code was probably broken in 1854, when CHARLES BABBAGE, developed the method of statistical analysis by which he successfully decrypted VIGENERE SQUARE messages. Unfortunately, due to his habit of not completing ‘the paperwork’, or possibly to protect the fact that because of his work Britain could decrypt Vigenere messages sent in the Crimea war, this fact was not discovered until well into the twentieth century. The honour of developing the statistical attack technique and cracking Vigenere cipher was to later go to the Prussian KASISKI in 1863

So we are now at the stage where keeping secrets through encrypting information has become a key weapon in warfare and can generate significant advantage to the country who can decipher the enemies’ secrets or intentions and can be clearly shown in the the beginning of

WWI, ie THE WAR TO END ALL WARS

And the event has now become known as THE ZIMMERMANN TELEGRAM

On the first day of hostilities, the British cable ship TELCONIA located and cut Germany’s transatlantic communications cables, forcing them to send all their international traffic via Sweden or American-owned cables. Both sets of cables ran through the UK and soon all German traffic was routinely routed to ROOM 40, of the Royal Navy’s cypher organisation.

On or about January 16, 1917 two Room 40 cryptanalyst WILLIAM

MONTGOMERY and NIGEL DE GRAY, were given a message encrypted in the German Foreign Office code, later to be known as BOOK CYPHER number 0075. By the next morning they had decrypted enough of the message to be extremely worried by its content. Sent by the German Foreign Minister ZIMMERMANN to the Mexican President via the German Embassies in Washington and Mexico City, it advised the President of Mexico that Germany proposed to start unrestricted submarine warfare in February and that he should, with German help, attack the US and also convince the Japanese to do the same.

In short order the full text was decrypted and presented to US President WILSON. On April 2, 1917 the then neutral US declared war on Germany and by 1918 Germany had been defeated.

Again, probably as a result of the experience of broken communications in WW1 the Enigma cipher machine was invented by the German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I.[1] Early models were used commercially from the early 1920s, and adopted by military and government services of several countries, most notably Nazi Germany before and during World War II.[2]

Several different Enigma models were produced, but the German military models are the most that are most commonly recognized. However, Japanese and Italian models were made and used.

EXAMPLE 7

The machines encryption was broken initially by the Polish but later the better quality machines by the British cryptologists who ended decrypting a vast number of messages, the intelligence gleaned from this source, codenamed "Ultra" by the British, was a substantial aid to the Allied war effort. Though Enigma had some cryptographic weaknesses, in practice it was German procedural flaws, operator mistakes, failure to systematically introduce continual key changes in the encryption procedures, and Allied capture of key tables and hardware that, during the war, enabled Allied cryptologists to succeed and "turned the tide" in the Allies' favour.

Finally, before I start the journey into modern day computing ciphers I would just like to re-establish the association with Freemasonry, i.e. Did freemasonry use many of the techniques of encryption we have discussed to date. I think the answer is simple yes – we wanted to protect our secrets from the attacks of the insidious

In the days before written ritual books, the ceremonies were passed by word of mouth, whilst the concept of the tracing board was present in even the earliest ceremonies, It was created using chalk and rubbed out at the end of the meeting thereby preserving the secrets. As masonry grew during its early years this practice became impracticable and a simple cipher was adopted, often referred to as the Pigpen or masonic Ciphers which was a version of a common substitution ciphers (i.e. numbers represent letters). Unfortunately, this cipher was easy to break and a more mature version was adopted utilising masonry symbols and techniques which meant that you also needed a knowledge of the subject matter and codes to break it.

EXAMPLE 8

As we move into the 20th and 21st century pretty much all masonic and previous ciphers were broken and whilst freemasonry flourished its secrets became more minor in nature and the principles of the organisation began to take a more prominent role.

However, in 1970 a curious enciphered manuscript was discovered in an East German library which eluded all attempts at decipherment. The Copiale Cipher is a beautifully bound green and gold book consisting of 105 pages and approximately 75,000 characters. The name Copiale comes from one of only two unencrypted references throughout the manuscript: “Copiales 3” and “Philipp 1866.” The code-breakers believe the latter is an owner’s mark and date created verified by modern day dating techniques which estimate the date of the book as between 1760–1780

(Note Ireland GL 1725, Scotland 1736 so dates are within range.

EAXMPLE 9

The document was forgotten about until quite recently when the challenges of decrypting it landed in the hands of an international team of academics from the U.S. and Sweden and finally in April 2011 (some 41 years after its discovery) the “Copiale Cipher” was broken, studied, and released to the public

Ironically breaking the code was the easy part as the academics were none masons they had to not only to deal with the funnies of 18 th

century German language but masonic phrases that we take for granted such as “tyling the lodge” – if you are not a mason this means nothing. It is therefore fully understandable that the text once broken was never reported as masonic ritual but on closer inspection there are many items that we know and understand, for example a direct quote from the translation

“as a carpet put on the floor. Hereon, drawn only with chalk, so that everything can be erased after the reception, various drawings are drawn, namely a circular staircase of seven steps, immediately above them a square with a mosaic mathematical table. The entire perimeter of the carpet is a narrow jagged edge, after the four plagis mundi [quarters of the world] the four letters E … S … W … N … are written. On the north side a column according to the holy order with columns of pomegranates, knobs and networks. The column stands towards east and the pedestal towards west, with the mosaic square horizontally. Written towards the middle of the column there is a big I … and on the southern side there is the same column where a B … stands. In the middle of the carpet there is a round star surrounded by beams or the so-called comet”

The practice of drawing tracing boards in chalk is something we see in lodges influenced by English Masonry which tells us these early German ceremonies were very much influenced by English Lodges but the desire to keep things secret from the common good were as

strong then as they are now.It is at this point that the journey for cyphers and encryption links to freemason end and modern day computerised encryption takes over, but as you will see there are still some aspects of our masonic methods that have survived even to this day in modern computing but before I start that journey I would like to start with some basic computing bits and bobs

COMPUTER BITS & BOBS

Please put your hands up if you have a toaster at home with a defrost setting?Brilliant – now hands up if you think your toaster has more computing power than the Apollo guidance Computer used in the moon landings

– well believe it or not your toaster has more computing power than the system which put man on the moon.

As comparison, if you have a mobile phone please take it out of your pocket – the Apollo Guidance computer used 64 kilobytes of memory and ran a processor speed of 0.043 megahertz per second. Your mobiles phone has a speed 1.85 gigahertz and a memory of 2 gigabytes (not storage) – in rough terms 46,250 times faster and 16,336 more memory

Now I’m going to explain these numbers as we will need to see how this relates to some of the elements later in the lecture.

All computers work with a number system called binary – essentially ones and zeros or on / off. In computer terms this value is called a bit.

**** USE SHEETS **** Example 10

By using a combination of bits (8 of them) you get what is known as a byte. In our computer language a byte is equivalent to a character such as the letter B. From then on we deal with multiples of 1024

If you combine 1024 bytes you get a kilo byte (ie. 1024 characters)

If you have 1024 kilobyte you get a megabyte (i.e (1,048,576 characters)

If you have 1024 mega bytes you get a gigabyte (i.e 1 billion, 73 million 741 thousand,824 characters)

If you get 1024 gigabytes you get a terabyte (i.e 1 trillion, 99 billion ,511 million 627 thousand and 776 characters – your modern day sky HD box has a 1.5 terabyte storage hard drive inside it.

So still using mutiples of 1024, beyond a terabyte is a petabyte, then exa byte, then zetta bytes then the last classification to date is a yottabyte which is equivalent of 1024 to the power of 8. What is also remarkable is that the density of storage has decreased over the years which means that modern day computer hard drives store 100 gigabyte per square inch of disk. However research is now looking a cellar storage as a human hair’s DNA sequence contains roughly 1 gigabyte (1 billion 73 million …..) characters of information.

Computing power works in a similar fashion only its scale references the amounts of arithmetic calculations (or MIPS) per second and the timing used to remain consistent megahertz. Until recently there was a professor called Gordon Moor who created the a guideline for how much faster processors will become over time. Moors laws which states the number of transistors per chip will double each year and therefore it’s compute power and most semiconductor industry manufacturers, including Gordon Moore, expect Moore's law will come to an end by around 2025 as transistors would reach the limits of miniaturization at atomic levels

Now with all this computer power and storage capacity available ciphers really stepped up a level in terms of complexity utilising complex mathematics calculation that until the power of computing had become available were not possible.

Modern day encryption owes much of it creation to a gentleman by the name of Claude Shammon who worked for Bell computer labs and defined many of the mathematical concepts behind modern day computer encryption which ultimately formed the Advanced Encryption Standard used on most websites and computer systems today.

As with all ciphers the concept of a key to code and unlock the encryption still exists and as computer power increases so does the length of the keys used as the shorter the key the easier it is to crack.

As an example the key used to decode a DVD 128 bit (16 bytes) key as shown in

EXAMPLE 11

The once declared un crackable code was broken as early as 2006 some 8 years after its commercial release – now DVDs are routine copied and pirated losing the industry billions of pounds of copyright revenue every year.

Modern day encryption keys must now use a minimum of 256 bit keys but more preferably 512 bit keys to have a resemblance of being classified as secure.

EXAMPLE 12

More interesting and re-establishing this link to masonry, the industry has adopted a fundamental part of masonic etiquette known in the industry as 2 factor authentication.

If we look to our masonic ritual in any degree we are taught that the grip or token demands a word – and only when the individual is in receipt of both the grip and the word are we to truly believe the individual is worthy of that trust, i.e. a mason.

As computer networks has become more and more widespread especially with the creation of the world wide web, this masonic concept has been adopted universally as a concept for verifying a machine or system sharing what is known as a public and private key.

In summarised form if I have a public key (the handshake) I’m allowed to connect at a common level and be able to partake in high level data exchanges. If I want to securely send or receive information directly between another device then both parties have to exchange our private keys then only my receiver and I can decode the information on the network without fear someone else can decode it ( unless I give them the word or key too)

This concept of public and private keys is usually stored on your computer as something called certificates

EXAMPLE 13

As a bit of free consultancy I cannot strongly suggest enough that at all times you pay attention to the address bar at the top of your internet browser, especially when dealing with purchases or banking transactions. If the is no https:// or a lock symbol do not do any financial or personal information as this is not secure. Of course if it is just info then viewing an insecure website is perfectly ok to do so.

So what is the state of play currently,

At the general man of the street level 256 bit encryption is safe enough and whilst the military and government invest heavily in variations of the AES standard with keys now between 512 bits and 1024 bit, they are currently deemed highly secure…… that is until I received the email I mentioned right at the beginning of the lecture on quantum computing.

As a person who has been in IT for over 28 years you get used to the constant buzz words within the industry and quantum computing has been suggested for a while but at a theoretical level. Unfortunately,

that theory is rapidly approaching realisation. If we continue to follow the trend that has been in place since computers were introduced, by 2040 we will not have the capability to power all of the machines around the globe, that’s according to a recent report by the Semiconductor Industry Association.

To prevent this, the industry is focused on finding ways to make computing more energy efficient, but classical computers are limited by the minimum amount of energy it takes them to perform one operation, i.e. 0+0, 1+0, 0+1 and 1+1

This energy limit is named after IBM Research Lab's Rolf Landauer, who in 1961 found that in any computer, each single bit operation must use an absolute minimum amount of energy so that heat is minimised. Heat is a by-product of processors performing compute instructions, hence the costs associated with large datacentres are mainly in the cooling power needed to prevent the servers overheating. Landauer's formula calculated the lowest limit of energy required for a computer operation, and in March this year researchers demonstrated it could be possible to make a chip that operates with this lowest energy. Low power means low heat and thermal dynamics between the transistors on the chip surface.

Quantum computing takes advantage of quantum particle physics (hence its name) and the strange ability of subatomic particles to exist in more than one state at any time. Due to the way the tiniest of particles behave, operations can be done much more quickly and use less energy than classical computers.

If we think of a quantum bit of information as a sphere, a classical bit can only be in two states on or off, i.e - at either of the two poles of the sphere, however a quantum bit can have a different value at any point on the sphere. This means a computer using these bits can store a huge amount more information using less energy than a classical computer.

EXAMPLE 14

Late last year, a team of Government and Nasa scientists found a prototype D-wave quantum computer when placed under computational load was 100 million times faster than a conventional computer. So what – things are always get smaller and faster I hear you saying – well yes but this machine can crack the strongest encryption method in use today in just a few hours which traditional machines would take decades or even centuries.

Let me put that in context – the owner of one of these machines in the example sheet has the ability to decode any available encryption method used by any organization or government. In my opinion, Information in business regarding your competitor is priceless, information on your opposing government is dangerous.

Example 15 – picture of DWARE computer

So is this just scaremongering – in my opinion no. The race is on to develop quantum encryptions methods that can withstand the huge computational power quantum computing gives and whilst there are claims that some such ciphers exist, testing them is extremely difficult as prototypes are extremely rare. Add to this that the only places you will find such quantum devices are in the hands of superpower governments and government funded organisations such as NASA they have the power to break any encryption and know the secrets of any company, state or country – very scary stuff indeed.

Documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2014 confirm the existing of Penetrating Hard Targets project,[160] by which the National Security Agency seeks to develop a quantum computing capability for cryptography purposes.[

So

To summarise in the early days of freemasonry I have no doubt that cryptography was as much a part of the expansion of freemasonry as was the railway to industrialization. The ability to keep a secret, or to share a secret, or even to break a secret was a strong a desire then as it is now. However, there is one fundamental part of masonry that a computer system will never break, that of brother love, relief and truth.

Worth Knights, I hope I have given you something to think about, if nothing else its allowed you to go to sleep for half an hour and I would like to thank you for your attention and hope you found some of it slightly interesting or remotely enlightening.