Breaking codes: An impossible task?
Recent reports that the United States had broken codes used by the Iranian intelligence service have intrigued experts on cryptology because a modern cipher should be unbreakable. Four leading British experts told BBC News Online that the story, if true, points to an operating failure by the Iranians or a backdoor way in by the National Security Agency (NSA) - the American electronic intelligence organisation.
The reports, from Washington, suggested that the Iranians had been tipped off by Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi political leader with links to Iran. He is said to have learned about the code-breaking from an American official who was drunk. Simon Singh, author of "The Code Book", a history of codes, said: "Modern codes are effectively unbreakable, very cheap and widely available. I could send an email today and all the world's secret services using all the computers in the world would not be able to break it. The code maker definitely has a huge advantage over the codebreaker."
The reason for this is that an encoded text is so complex that it can resist all efforts to break it.
