Beyond Schlock on Screen: Teaching the History of Cryptology Through Media Representations of Secret Communications Peter Krapp Professor, Film & Media Studies/ Informatics Humanities Gateway 2321 University of California, Irvine [email protected] Abstract The overall arc of the course leads students to ponder the motivations for secure and secret This paper lays out the course design for, transmissions, from assurances of communication and teaching experiences with, a class that integrity to various forms of authentication, and introduces students in the humanities to beyond a na"ive identification of concealment with the history of cryptology, with particular security. Once they wrap their heads around the attention to film and media studies. The difference between steganography and cryptology course covers principles of secret and begin to appreciate the nuances of substitution communication from ancient times to the and transposition ciphers, historical examples 2 I81 century, and encourages students to from the ancient Skytale to forms of the Pigpen develop creative solutions that may help cipher allow hands-on decoding experience. After portray computing, computer networks, an aside about steganography and invisible ink, it and cybersecurity issues in more informed is time for methods of cracking monoalphabetic and accurate ways on screen. substitution (Kahn 1967, Macrakis 2014, Singh 1999). Most students at the University of 1 Introduction California have sufficient prior exposure to American history to enjoy exploring secret While it may seem paradoxical to combine communications from Independence to the Civil communication and secrecy, in fact media history War, amplified by selected screenings from TV can be told as the story of secret communications shows like Turn (2014-2017) about the Culper - from long before the earliest radio transmissions Ring - which also makes an appearance in season and interceptions to long after the commercial 4, episode 6 (2012-2013) of the TV show White union of military technology and entertainment in Collar in contemporary New York City. Many television. In this course, students discover the also enjoy tracing the mechanization of ciphers media history of codes and ciphers from ancient from the Alberti disc to the Mexican Army disc cultures to the advent of computing, with a focus and from the Jefferson wheel cipher to the US on secret communication mostly before the proto­ Army's M-94 cylinder used as late as 1942. computers of Bletchley Park, while connecting historical methods to contemporary questions of Media representations of secrecy and security secrecy, privacy, and security in the Internet age. in communications allow students to tackle the Readings include short stories and selected Vigenere table, try taking the Kasiski test, articles and chapters from the history of visualize implementations of ciphers from encryption and code breaking. Each week also Polybius to ADFGVX, and wrap their heads features hands-on exercises (in class as well as in around Friedman's index of coincidence homework), and workshops on 21st century (Kackman 2005, Bauer 2013). In order to applications of historical models, with particular introduce the enduring mystique of Number attention to the often fundamentally irreconcilable Stations, it helps to have them listen not just to a demands of privacy, security, trust, data integrity, few tracks from the CONET Project (1997), but and freedom of speech (Diffie/Landau 2007). also from the Wilco album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot This, however, is not a class in computer science (2001) from a band many of them recognize; or informatics, and it requires neither facility with moreover, the thriller Numbers Station (2013) number theory nor an appetite for algorithms. starring John Cusack and Malin Akerman can lead to a fruitful discussion of how faithful film and Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Historical Cryptology, pages 79-85 Mons, Belgium, 23-26 June, 2019 television should be to real technology. One 2 Overcoming the schlock paradigm pivotal homework assignment therefore is a film What does encrypted communication look like? review focusing on ciphers and codes as they are The problem with audiovisual representations of explored in cinema and television. The list of cybersecurity in particular and computer networks acceptable titles ranges from Rendezvous (1935) in general is that they are all too often turned into and Cipher Bureau (1938) to The Imitation Game ludicrous caricatures on screen. Even computer­ (2014) and Mr Robot (2015-2019), but most focused TV dramas like CSL Cyber (2015) get students tend to pick neither the most recent nor numerous details so wrong that few computer­ the oldest examples, preferring to stick instead with espionage fare from the eighties or nineties - literate viewers can stand to watch. Computing is not about blinking lights and pixels - and it does often several vie for writing up Sneakers (1992) not help to lard the script with misused and or Pi (1998). mispronounced jargon. Malicious code does not The course pivots on storytelling and show up in red on your screen, and a forensic visualization, but since it cannot require advanced review takes more than a few minutes. mathematics or informatics knowledge, it focuses Cybercrime is more likely to involve phishing for mainly on ciphers and codes before the advent of credit card numbers or trade secrets rather than computing, without omitting Navajo code talkers, kidnapping. When it comes to real or imaginary Enigma and Colossus, etc. Students quickly grasp risks online, movies and TV shows dish up tired why linguists developed frequency analysis as a iterations that not only perpetuate stereotypes of way to crack simple substitution ciphers, and how hacking as ( usually male) teenage flirtation with nomenclators and book codes aided trade and crime, but perhaps offend even more in how they diplomacy (Kahn 1967). Yet without requiring depict data 'space' as an arcade game. students in such a course to tackle prime The countless TV shows and movies that get factorization or hash functions, it is nonetheless computing, encryption, and decryption wrong important to discuss how much their internet use tend to make two types of mistakes: they want to depends on cryptographic principles - once they glamorize the actions of a person in front of a share how much their daily life revolves around computer, and they try to visualize the flow of trust in online communications with banks and stores, doctors and pharmacies, educational data in networks, often in a ludicrous manner. Take the recent Michael Mann movie Blackhat institutions and entertainment, it is not difficult to (2015), which has Chris Hemsworth's character illustrate how much the infrastructure of secure come out of prison to help combat international communications depends on asymmetric ciphers cybercrime. Setting aside the idea that Thor (Bauer 2007, Quisquater 1990). should be a computer nerd ( and that he reads Finally, the course ends with a survey of Baudrillard and Derrida in his prison cell instead unsolved cryptological puzzles, touching on of, say, Schneier or Kahn), while the plot features Voynich, Beale, Zodiac, and Kryptos (Schmeh tricking a government employee into changing his 2015, Clemens 2016, Bauer 2017). At the password (so an outsider may gain access), its conclusion of this writing-intensive seminar, garish attempt to visualize data on a network is a students are expected to have gained greater major throwback to the bad old days of films like facility with the relevant historical and critical The Net (1995), Hackers (1995), Sneakers (1992), vocabulary, deeper knowledge about media War Games (1983), or Tron (1982). Of course, history, a keener appreciation for codes and Hackers (1995) is remembered mainly because it ciphers, an ability to critically evaluate conflicting featured Angelina Jolie as one of two high demands on communication, and a better schoolers involved in corporate extortion, but it understanding of both fictional and real secrecy also featured a virus that can speak and has a face, (Glass 2013, Koblitz 2010, Koss 2014). In and its protagonists spend more time trash talking addition to familiarizing students with conceptual and partying than using computers. The Net and historical content, this course involves (1995) has Sandra Bullock stumble around advanced information literacy skills by locating, bulletin boards as if ordering pizza online was a evaluating and integrating information gathered radical act of subversion, and while this film does from multiple sources into discipline-specific show some true aspects of the net (such as IP writing. addresses), it does not do enough with them to ground it in computing reality - you could not 80 connect via telnet to an email address, for employer's name? We are supposed to believe instance, you need an IP address and a TCP port that pulling a physical cable out of the wall is the number: only once you are connected can you only thing experts in Langley can do to defend the initiate an email login. Nor would a Macintosh CIA against an onslaught of internet connections virus from 1995 infect a mainframe computer. seeking pornographic cam-shows? Shows like that tend to take computers less seriously than Interestingly, Sneakers (1992), an ensemble Indiana Jones is serious about archeology ... caper conceived during the making of Wargames (1983), features a black box capable of breaking This is not just a question of