Edgar Allen Poe - The Greatest Cryptographer
The theme for the RSA conference is Edgar Allen Poe. At first glance I wondered why Poe would be the feature theme for the world’s largest tech security conference.
After further reading, it makes a lot of sense. Cryptography is a hallmark of Internet security. Poe treated cryptography in his journalism and fiction. In his day, he was admired as muh for his writing as his cryptographic skills.
“The most profound and skillful cryptographer who ever lived”
– Massachusetts Clergyman on Poe
It’s the Dartmouth professor angle that makes Poe’s legacy even more interesting. In I839, Poe challenged “his readers to submit their ciphers to him, asserting that he would solve them all.” He solved all the ciphers. He then made a new challenge to his reader, offering a magazine subscription if they could solve the ciphers submitted by Mr. W. B. Tyler, praising the author as a “gentleman whose abilities we highly respect.”
No one ever solved the ciphers until 1995 when Professor Louis Renza announced his own theory about the ciphers.
There the ciphers remained until 1985 when Professor Louis Renza of Dartmouth College suggested that Tyler was actually a double for Poe himself. Renza’s theory was later elaborated by Shawn Rosenheim in his book The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Allan Poe to the Internet. In it, Rosenheim points to the likelihood that the ciphers were placed in the magazine by Poe himself as a final challenge to his readers.
It just goes to show that the most effective cryptography achieves its success through the power of the individual more than anything else.
And Poe was one powerful individual. His legacy still remains paramount, even after 170 years.
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