Songs of the Universe

We realize that not everyone spends their lives in dark rooms banging keyboards. Neither is everyone a geek, nerd, computer freak, mathematician or rocket scientist. So if cryptography makes as much sense to you as speaking Swahili backwards, then you are in the right place.

Here we will try to enlighten you as to the general workings of cryptography (secret codes) in as painless a way as we can. We will also try to stay away from any math. Well, there is a little, but easy stuff, we promise. Enjoy.

Private Key Encryption

Cryptography Part IV

Encrypting or Enciphering (same thing)

Ahh at last, the meat. This section is where it all begins to come together. We promised to keep this easy, so we are just going to skim the surface. Why? Because the important part is simply getting the message into gobbledy-goop so that no one without the key can read it. The mechanics of doing it are not nearly as important as the result. But hopefully, it will prove fun and interesting.

OK, so now we have a key, we have a message, and someone to send it to. Now what? Now we encrypt or encipher the message.

Encryption systems, well secure encryption systems anyway, are surprisingly difficult to produce. Almost everyone, especially among computer people, has at one time or another tried to produce a new encryption system. Most are simple and don't come near to being difficult to crack, just ask Julius Caesar.

There are any number of encryption systems out there, but essentially they all boil down to substituting something in place of the original text. Here are a few terms that will help explain the process:

Block Ciphers

Block ciphers simply break down your message into blocks of a certain size. Each block is then scrambled with your encryption key. Sometimes the key itself is broken down into blocks and each piece is used to encipher one block of your message. This is the method used in the AES, discussed below.

Stream Ciphers

Stream ciphers begin at the start of your message and run (stream) through each character, enciphering as they go. They use part of the message itself combined with your key to do their job.

These ciphers also have some interesting properties. One is that they have the ability to 'stretch' even short keys into incredibly long ones without repetition. This means that the 'period' - the amount of time before it begins to repeat - is extremely long. We will talk more about this in a bit.

Hashing Algorithm

A hashing algorithm pretty much says what it does. It turns your password or key into hash. It does the same to your message. It always produces a single number as its output. The neat thing about it is that if you put the same information in, you always get the same number out. But change even one tiny part of the input and the number will change. So what good is that? The number can be used as a ...

Digital Signature

A digital signature, sometimes called a message digest, is unique to each message/password combination. This is known as message authentication. So if someone were to try to change your message it will show in the digital signature. So if the message decrypts correctly, it can be considered authentic.


Without getting all geeky on you, that should give you enough to understand what we are trying to do and how we do it.

Now, let's look at a few examples of encryption systems. We will look at only a few, as there are many. The few we mention here are used in government, financial, Internet and other environments on a daily basis and are considered secure, at least up to a reasonable point:

The Caesar Cipher

We have talked about this one before. Just shifting the alphabet and substituting letters, and it certainly is not secure. We just toss it in here to make you feel like you know what you are doing here. It is completely useless as an encryption system today.

DES - the Data Encryption Standard

Probably the all time weenie of encryption systems. When this system first came out in 1975, it was already deemed 'weak' by most cryptanalysts, since it used only 56 bits or 7 character keys.

The feeling was that the NSA didn't actually want the public to have an encryption system that they could not break. In our opinion the real give-away was that the NSA itself prohibited the use of DES for encrypting anything that had to actually be kept secret.

It has since been broken and is no longer - if it ever has been - considered secure.

Triple DES and the AES

Since the cracking of DES, the NSA decided to boost the security by making the system 3 times as strong. This was called Triple DES or 3DES. It was the same as DES, but done three times with three different keys. It encrypted, decrypted and encrypted and at each step used a different key. Begun in 1999 it was dropped in 2001 in favor of AES - Advanced Encryption Standard.

AES is what is known as a block cipher. That is, your message is broken into blocks of a certain size and each block is then encrypted. It uses a lot of very simple (for a computer) matrix math and data manipulation. This makes it fast. Certainly an improvement over DES.

Unfortunately, there is already a known effective attack for the system. Fortunately, the attack is not easy to implement. Evidently the government doesn't seem too concerned about this minor detail, since AES is going forward anyway.

RSA, PGP and PKI

The all time powerhouse of Public Key Encryption. This is the original and perhaps only successful system of its type. It is used extensively by governments, financial institutions, corporations and just about everybody else. If you have ever purchased anything over the Internet, you have used the RSA Public Key System. PGP also uses RSA. PKI or Public Key Infrastructure is a framework that supports encryption systems within the enterprise. Its primary components are the Digital Certificates, Key Generation system and Certificate Authorities that act as repositories for the public keys.

This system relies on two really huge prime numbers multiplied together to produce an incredibly monstrous product. The product is used to encipher a message and one of the primes is used to decipher it. That is not the entire story, of course, but we promised to keep this simple, which the RSA algorithm isn't.

The two major drawbacks to the system are that (1) it is slow and (2) it bloats the messages. This is well known, and so the system is usually just applied to establishing a secure connection between browser and server. Then, within this secure connection you are switched to using the...

RC4 Streaming Cipher

This is a private key system that we mentioned above. In addition to the obvious features of speed and high complexity, it has another unique property. It emulates almost perfectly the One-Time Pad. That is, it makes use of a unique key that is just as long as the message itself. Add to this the message authentication power of the hashing algorithm called SHA-1 and you have one of the world's most secure systems.

Once the key is 'hashed' it is placed into a thing called a 'substitution box' or S-Box. Each letter of your message is then swapped with one from the S-Box in a complex and seemingly random manner. It is impossible to tell just how the substitution will take place, as it is highly dependent on the contents of both the key and the message. Once the process has gone through all of your message, the encryption is complete.

On the receiving end, the same process is done in reverse. The receiver must use the exact key to decipher the message as was used to encipher it. The result is the original message, or the 'Plain Text' as it is called.

Songs of the Universe

Songs of the Universe, or SOTU as some like to call us, uses proven technology for its encryption engine. In short, we use the RC4 Stream Cipher and the SHA-1 and optionally MD5 (another, albeit a bit weaker) hashing algorithms.

However, we added one twist over all other products of this type: We eliminated the one weak point that exists in all the other private key systems. That is the Pseudo-Random Number Generator (PRNG) used to make up the keys.

Songs of the Universe uses pure random numbers generated by Mother Nature herself. This is a huge leap over current systems. Since the keys are totally random, there are never any repeated patterns and no way to determine the key from the available data. In other words, even if your message is intercepted, there is no way to crack it using currently known methods. This makes it a truly beautiful, tight and secure system.

To summarize:

You have the first successful computer version of the One-Time Pad
Keys are used only once and then destroyed, just as in the original paper version.
No traces left for the bad guys to use on your next message.
Truly random keys without human influence.
The world's strongest and fastest encryption algorithms
Keys even the Federal government can't break

So quit wasting time and go buy Songs of the Universe.



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