The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Code-breaking. Simon Singh
continued until Muhammad died some twenty years later. The revelations were recorded by various scribes during the Prophet’s life, but only as fragments, and it was left to Ab
The ruling caliph was responsible for carrying on the work of the Prophet, upholding his teachings and spreading his word. Between the appointment of Ab
The richness of Islamic culture was to a large part the result of a wealthy and peaceful society. The Abbasid caliphs were less interested than their predecessors in conquest, and instead concentrated on establishing an organised and affluent society. Lower taxes encouraged businesses to grow and gave rise to greater commerce and industry, while strict laws reduced corruption and protected the citizens. All of this relied on an effective system of administration, and in turn the administrators relied on secure communication achieved through the use of encryption. As well as encrypting sensitive affairs of state, it is documented that officials protected tax records, demonstrating a widespread and routine use of cryptography. Further evidence comes from many administrative manuals, such as the tenth-century Adab al-Kutt
The administrators usually employed a cipher alphabet which was simply a rearrangement of the plain alphabet, as described earlier, but they also used cipher alphabets that contained other types of symbols. For example, a in the plain alphabet might be replaced by # in the cipher alphabet, b might be replaced by +, and so on. The monoalphabetic substitution cipher is the general name given to any substitution cipher in which the cipher alphabet consists of either letters or symbols, or a mix of both. All the substitution ciphers that we have met so far come within this general category.
Had the Arabs merely been familiar with the use of the monoalphabetic substitution cipher, they would not warrant a significant mention in any history of cryptography. However, in addition to employing ciphers, the Arab scholars were also capable of destroying ciphers. They in fact invented cryptanalysis, the science of unscrambling a message without knowledge of the key. While the cryptographer develops new methods of secret writing, it is the cryptanalyst who struggles to find weaknesses in these methods in order to break into secret messages. Arabian cryptanalysts succeeded in finding a method for breaking the monoalphabetic substitution cipher, a cipher that had remained invulnerable for several centuries.
Cryptanalysis could not be invented until a civilisation had reached a sufficiently sophisticated level of scholarship in several disciplines, including mathematics, statistics and linguistics. The Muslim civilisation provided an ideal cradle for cryptanalysis, because Islam demands justice in all spheres of human activity, and achieving this requires knowledge, or ilm. Every Muslim is obliged to pursue knowledge in all its forms, and the economic success of the Abbasid caliphate meant that scholars had the time, money and materials required to fulfil their duty. They endeavoured to acquire the knowledge of previous civilisations by obtaining Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, Farsi, Syriac, Armenian, Hebrew and Roman texts and translating them into Arabic. In 815, the Caliph al-Ma’m
At the same time as acquiring knowledge, the Islamic civilisation was able to disperse it, because it had procured the art of paper-making from the Chinese. The manufacture of paper gave rise to the profession of warraq
In addition to a greater understanding of secular subjects, the invention of cryptanalysis also depended on the growth of religious scholarship. Major theological schools were established in Basra, Kufa and Baghdad, where theologians scrutinised the revelations of Muhammad as contained in the Koran. The theologians were interested in establishing the chronology of the revelations, which they did by counting the frequencies of words contained in each revelation. The theory was that certain words had evolved relatively recently, and hence if a revelation contained a high number of these newer words, this would indicate that it came later in the chronology. Theologians also studied the Had
Significantly, the religious scholars did not stop their scrutiny at the level of words. They also analysed individual letters, and in particular they discovered that some letters are more common than others. The letters a and I are the most common in Arabic, partly because of the definite article al-, whereas the letter j appears only a tenth as frequently. This apparently innocuous observation would lead to the first great breakthrough in cryptanalysis.
Although it is not known who first realised that the variation in the frequencies of letters could be exploited in order to break ciphers, the earliest known description of the technique is by the ninth-century scientist Ab
One way to solve an encrypted message, if