"On October 30, 1942, a group of destroyer warships from the British Royal Navy hunted down a Nazi submarine near the Nile Delta. The warships pounded the submarine with underwater explosions until it floated to the surface, where it started filling with water and sinking."
"Deep inside the flooding commanding officers' quarters, the men seized the volumes before the water-soluble ink dissolved into the sea. Only the teenager made it out alive."
"The submarine story and dozens more like it highlight a catch-22 that plagued cryptography for millennia: to speak in code, you must first agree on a code."
"Called the key-distribution problem, this cryptography pitfall seems to imply that to establish a private communication channel, we effectively need privacy to begin with."
On October 30, 1942, British warships targeted a Nazi submarine near the Nile Delta. British sailors Lieutenant Anthony Fasson, Colin Grazier, and Tommy Brown boarded the sinking vessel to retrieve valuable books containing codes for the Enigma machine. Only Brown survived the mission. The codes were later used by Alan Turing's team to decode Nazi messages, significantly impacting the war's duration. This incident illustrates the key-distribution problem in cryptography, where establishing a secure communication channel requires prior privacy, creating a paradox in secure messaging.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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