<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" &amp;quot;Cryptography&amp;quot; comes from the ancient Greek for &amp;quot;secret writing.&amp;quot; And in the beginning, that&amp;#039;s all it was\u2014a way to keep written words safe from prying eyes. As Simon Singh says, &amp;quot;As soon as you have something precious to hide, you have people who want to steal it.&amp;quot;  Singh is the author of The Code Book, which traces the history of cryptography from ancient times to the present day. This past weekend, he was one of four panelists at the World Science Festival discussing where our secret-keeping technology is headed and how to keep information safe as the arms race against thieves escalates.  Cryptography is everywhere now\u2014not just in military or intelligence circles. You use it shopping online, banking at ATMs and opening your garage door. The information that you send, whether to a banking institution, an online retailer, or even just to your garage door gets encrypted through a mathematical algorithm so that whatever information you&amp;#039;re sending isn&amp;#039;t visible to the rest of the world. But as we&amp;#039;ve just seen recently with the attacks on RSA, which provides SecurID tokens to national security groups and contractors, no system is totally safe.  So what can be done? First, the experts say, these algorithms need to be tested. That&amp;#039;s the job of panelist Orr Dunkelman\u2014he&amp;#039;s a modern code-breaker. Dunkelman, from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, isn&amp;#039;t trying to break into security systems to steal secrets, though; he&amp;#039;s testing systems to find their weaknesses. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s the difference between saying &amp;#039;This is a good car&amp;#039; and putting it through crash tests, and a [car thief] crashing it into something,&amp;quot; Dunkelman said. &amp;quot;We don&amp;#039;t break the codes, we try to analyze how secure they are.&amp;quot; And usually, the code or algorithm is pretty secure. But the reality is that money, possessions and identities are stolen every day by hackers who have figured out how to beat the system. &amp;quot;The problem is not the algorithm, it&amp;#039;s the way the algorithm is used, and the user,&amp;quot; Tal Rabin says. Rabin is the head of IBM&amp;#039;s Cryptography Research Group.  Sometimes the problem of human error can be on the manufacturer&amp;#039;s end. Brad Snow, a former cryptographer at the National Security Agency, gives the example of new cars that have keyless entry systems vulnerable to high-tech attacks. Typically, the key transmits an encrypted wireless signal that unlocks the car door when the key is close to the car. But thieves have figured out a loophole: One thief walks close behind a driver who is walking away after leaving his nice new car in a parking lot. The thief carries a radio transmitter that broadcasts the key&amp;#039;s signal to a corresponding transmitter held by an accomplice lingering near the car door. The signal unlocks the car, and the thieves can simply drive off with it. Throughout the entire process, the encryption remains secure, but the delivery method is entirely compromised. &amp;quot;Cars are being stolen that way today,&amp;quot; Snow says. It&amp;#039;s not just about cars: Snow is worried that the sloppy encryption methods used by companies today could pose serious issues for national security. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re taking too much risk,&amp;quot; Snow says. &amp;quot;[Hackers] could crash the world economy today if they wanted.&amp;quot; Yet there&amp;#039;s no way to avoid all attacks, because the weakest link of an encryption method is the human element. To drive home this point, Singh brought a historical curiosity called the Enigma machine to the World Science Festival for show and tell. It&amp;#039;s a small, innocuous-looking wooden box, but during World War II, Germans used these boxes to send top-secret military communications. &amp;quot;This box of tricks is the algorithm; it does the scrambling,&amp;quot; Singh said. The Enigma machine could encode and then decode communications in hundreds of millions of different ways, presenting a challenge to Allied code-breakers\u2014the cryptographers of their day. But human error was the Enigma machine&amp;#039;s downfall. Its decoding settings had to be delivered by hand in order for the encoded messages to make any sense at all, and messengers could fall across any number of pitfalls on their journey. They could easily be delayed, distracted, or targeted by the enemy, periodically allowing codes to fall into Allied hands. &amp;quot;A system is only as good as is weakest link,&amp;quot; panel moderator Josh Zepps says. That remains true today, even though our communications are usually beamed through the air rather than delivered by hand. People are the ones who write down passwords and lose them, use the same password for multiple online accounts or simply forget to lock doors to rooms where important computer servers are kept. Dunkelman tells a story about an experiment done just a few years ago in London, where employees at high-profile companies were asked to give up their computer and online passwords in exchange for a candy bar. To the dismay of the cryptographic community, the vast majority of workers did. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/how-to/a12012/cryptography-at-world-science-festival-2011-humans-are-the-weakest-link/>