Blackadder: “Security?”
Gen. Melchett: “Security is not a dirty word, Blackadder.”
Except that it might well be to your average IT professional these days. Security is a buzz topic (a ghastly turn of phrase, I grant you, but too apt to ignore) in the world of IT right now. With workforces increasingly mobile, and data being proliferated to devices that are increasingly likely to be free of the kensington lock – desk leg shackles, communicating securely with these devices and keeping the data they themselves contain secure in the event of loss is right up there on the pain list of any IT professional.
Mind you if they think they have it bad (and they do to be fair), there are examples going back in history where there has been far more at stake than data loss. Take the example of Mary Queen of Scots who, imprisoned on charges of treason having been implicated in a plot to kill her cousin Queen Elizabeth I, relied totally on encryption to communicate with others while in captivity. At stake for her was her life, and thanks to the superior snooping and decryption skills of Sir Francis Walsingham, Mary was convicted of treason and later executed.
The history of encryption goes back even further than Tudor England, to the Gallic Wars and Julius Caesar, after whom arguable the world’s first cipher was named. Prior to this cipher, the only method of communicating securely was a practise known as steganography, which involved using different means to conceal the message by for example, invisible ink. Encryption had obvious advantages over steganography and so became the de-facto means of trying to communicate securely.
Over the years, faster and more devious methods of encryption were devised – shift ciphers, attempts at randomisation, all meant encryption became ever more elaborate. Decryption too, thanks to techniques such as frequency analysis developed by Arab mathematicians, developed apace. It is actually thanks to this sort of elaboration that we get the word ‘secretary’ – someone whose function it was to encode and decode messages for the emissaries and recipients.
Computers came into the picture most notably during World War II and the extraordinary efforts of the codebreakers at Bletchley Park armed with Turing’s “bombes” fighting an absorbing (and sapping) battle against the Germans and their equally ingenious Enigma. It is a pretty intuitive leap from this to the encrypted communications on which we all rely today, whether it’s to protect our identity on social network sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn; our financial details using online banking or; even more prosaically, just making sure that the data on our laptops and phones is secure in the eventuality the device itself is misplaced. Encryption is a vital part of executing transactions securely these days, and as with anything it requires a processing overhead.
Amidst all the talk of intelligent turbo boost, core counts, Hyperthreading and a host of other technologies in Intel’s 2010 Core(tm) and Xeon(r) offerings, spare a thought for seven unsung instructions that go by the collective name of AES-NI. These plucky little instructions are doing their bit in the datacentre and on your laptop (or PC), like Mary’s secretary or Bletchley’s codebreakers and bombes, trying to keep you speedy, safe and secure while go about your business doing - er – business.
Footnote: if you're interested in this topic, listen to BBC Radio 4's In Our Time on the subject of Cyptography.
