Shakespeare, Bacon, and the NSA

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[Music] so I I told Dr Green after his keynote this morning this actually is gonna his talk was not gonna be the only crypto means cryptology talk so Buckle in because we're doing we're going way back to when when Taylor Swift wasn't born for 75 years so I'm going a little further back than than Dr Green went and and the reality is uh that this story the story is really a love story and it's a love story that kind of begins and ends with a pretty powerful concept a concept that what really makes a person powerful isn't anything in the traditional senses of power but not in you know strength or Force but that knowledge uh knowledge itself is power

and that's actually a quote from uh Francis Bacon who was an English philosopher uh and Statesman who lived in the 17th century uh the time of Shakespeare the time of the colonization of North America and when the foundations of a lot of really modern science uh was being laid and yes Francis Bacon is the uh bacon in the title of this presentation so I'm sorry to disappoint any bacon lovers that were expecting something a little different but uh hopefully it's okay and while Bacon's quote is kind of the beginning of our story it also ends with that same quote on a tombstone of a man named William Freeman and then again our story isn't really about William but about his

better half in many ways Elizabeth Smith Friedman and Elizabeth is the one who decided to place knowledge's power on the tombstone that was her husband's Tombstone and would be hers too the end of her life later and she also put in that quote a secret code uh code that reminded her of how they met how they ended up spending their lives together lives that saw the foundation of a different modern science cryptology spoiler alert and the one that you and I rely on every day right that one that's Central to everything we do and how we secure ourselves like Dr Green talked about this morning how do we secure ourselves our knowledge really from those who would seek to gain

its power so before I introduce myself I'd like to introduce Elizabeth Smith it is Elizabeth spelled with two e's and no a uh she was the youngest of nine Smith children and the theory goes that her mother kind of wanted to give her something when your last name Smith you don't really have anything so she got an illusion unusual spelling of Elizabeth to help set her apart she was born in a small town in Indiana uh raised on a Farm by her Quaker Dairy farming father and mother and his her father could actually Trace his lineage all the way back to an English Quaker who sailed to America in 1682 on the same boat as William Penn of

state north of us Fame and from a young age she knew she wanted to do something different than the ordinary she didn't want the pre-prescribed life for herself she wanted to break with tradition break the mold kind of plot her own course a letter early to defy her father's wishes and attend college and even after that the prescribed path for her at that point would have been well teaching at the high school level and you know living at home that didn't work out of her out for her so she left and headed to Chicago hoping to find their job there doing something interesting something unusual and boy did she ever and so I'm really excited to talk to you

today about that story my name is Brendan and yeah it's also spelled in an interesting way and this is actually the first b-sides that I've ever attended so back in December I was given the opportunity to join a company called project Discovery where the makers of open source security tools like nuclei and SubFinder and httpx and many others and I was really excited to join this community I spent most of my career up until now in developer tooling most recently I was at a company called gitlab for five years and that led me to see the power that open source can bring to bear on problems that real practitioners face not just the ones that look good in a

demo or sell really well from one person in a suit to another person in a suit so I hope that you'll indulge me a little bit here with Elizabeth's story I promise if you stick around I'll apply it back to our day-to-day lives and working to secure ourselves and our organizations I just also think there's something special to be learned from the history of what Elizabeth did what part she actually didn't get credit to credit for until very recently and even how she came to do in the first place so how she came to do it in the first place is Elizabeth was always interested in history and language and she learned that in Chicago at an obscure Library a

private Library called the Newberry Library there was a rare and unique piece of History called the first folium so you see in Shakespeare's time the spoken word was valued much higher than the written word and so while he was alive actually none of his plays were recorded and printed in any meaningful way and it wasn't until seven years after his death that a group of admirers gathered 36 of his Works into a published book and the act of publishing that first folio was in and of itself a radical act right to suggest that some mere mortal man like Shakespeare deserved the same treatment and preservation that was at that time really only preserved for the Bible

so not many copies of this first folio existed and in the early 1900s uh the Newberry Library had one of the few copies available in America and Elizabeth's curiosity and desire for something new drove her to go see it and that would start this chain of events that led to the foundation of a science when Elizabeth got to the library she started talking to a librarian about you know the folio and what Elizabeth wanted to do next in her life and the librarian remembered this eccentric millionaire who was looking for someone just like Elizabeth and within the next hour George Fabian showed up in the limousine absconded with Elizabeth took her to a train station led her all the way to his

estate in Geneva Illinois which was called Riverbank and at Riverbank Fabian uh here had assembled uh scientists and inquisitive Minds from all over the country and he was footing the bill as they experimented with a wide-ranging set of activities from uh botany to genetics to Acoustics and most critically to Elizabeth one of fabian's most prized projects was involved the first folio and a theory about the true author of Shakespeare's masterpieces you see a riverbank there was this other woman Mrs Elizabeth Wells Gallup with the traditional Za Elizabeth rather than Elizabeth R Elizabeth Ze she ran a school called the riverbank Cipher School and a cipher of course is a secret or disguised way of writing you know some

sort of code and Mrs Gallup had been working for years on a secret code that she believed was embedded in the first folio a secret code that if proven correct would have changed our understanding of not only English literature but of the history of the United Kingdom itself as well so here we're going to take a little detour there's lots of detours on this road today sorry to talk about the cipher method that Mrs Gallup was pressure was was pursuing and looking for in the first folio so in his time Francis Bacon had actually revealed that he invented a new type of Cipher a method to Signal what he called Omnia per Omnia anything by anything

so the Insight led him to the discovery that you know you could have this ability to represent all the letters of the alphabet using only two letters if you combine them in permutations of five letter blocks and at the time his time uh I and J and and unw were interchangeable so um the bacon alphabet looked something like this and I was going to make two slides but that was hard but yes this also then is the part of the theory that led Claude Shannon much later to come to refine our modern view of information theory that binary code zeros and ones could be used to represent all of the world's data and in fact

interestingly enough 1916 was the year that Shannon was born that's also the year that Elizabeth showed up at Riverbank so history kind of has a lot of those fun little little uh notes but that's another digression so Mrs Gallup believed that uh and had written actually an entire book that in the first folio the printers had intentionally used an A and B form of letters through you know differences in how they printed the letters to embed this bacon Cipher into the document itself and she had produced many pages translating this by literal ciphertext into real text and what she found really Disturbed her and actually made headlines in the day um see she found uh that Francis Bacon

himself was actually the author of all of The Works attributed to Shakespeare and other authors and that he was actually the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth and thus the rightful heir to the throne of England and Mrs Gallup had been doing this work for 20 years by this point and there were a lot of people that believed this Theory throughout history so Mark Twain Nathaniel Hawthorne they believe that this was possible but proof had always been Elusive and Mrs Gallup thought she had that proof a scientific method of determining this a versus B form of the letters and it was a and that she had done it in a reproducible way but what she needed was someone to reproduce it

which is where Elizabeth came in so Mrs Gallup would set her to work trying to reproduce those results with kind of this vague and honestly hard to understand description of what the biformed alphabet was like there's this slight difference in the stem of an H or the tilt of the oval of a g is more or less in this form and so Elizabeth at the time in her diary likened it to trying to sort blueberries by color or beach pebbles by smoothness uh and she needed Mrs gallup's help to even get the first 24 word translation done but from there she was sent out to go on her own and try to reproduce all these results and for weeks she

continued in this work right she tried her best to interpret Miss gallup's uh notes and what she had created and while this was tedious work she was enjoying the cool Illinois summer and got to meet all these nice cool people doing the stuff at Ware Riverbank and met a man named William Friedman who was an aspiring geneticist who was Raising fruit flies to try and understand the role of genes in various traits and again this is 40 years before the discovery of the double helix of DNA so you know relatively new and groundbreaking science so Elizabeth and William had this kind of instant friendship one that they cultivated on weekends and in between their work they understood one another

they trusted another in one another's intellect in a way that was different than other folks that they were friends with at Riverbank and most of the folks at Riverbank were content to kind of you know be paid to do interesting work and not ask too many questions uh William was aware of this first folio Cipher project as well because he was the resident photographer and so he was the one that had to make the enlargements of the folio that Mrs Gallup was making uh and he was also fascinated with ciphers he put hidden messages in sketches that he made um that would then look like any other Botanical illustration but would have like hidden words like bacon and

Shakespeare in them and as summer turned to autumn and winter Elizabeth knew that William and her were growing a lot closer but she was unsure of what to call it but this growing closeness led her to build up the courage to share something that she had been thinking about for months something that had been kind of eating away to her and something that was very sacrilegious to even think at Riverbank much less share out loud and that's the reality that there are no hidden messages in Shakespeare Elizabeth was revealed to find that William shared the same doubt you know they were they talked together but what if everyone involved in the bacon idea was was you know delusional except for

them what would that mean for their work and their lives together but before they had time to figure that out a much more pressing matter came to change the course of their lives so at 11 A.M on February 27 1917 the Secretary of State at the time Robert Lanson carried a copy of an intercepted telegram that had made its way up the chain to in Washington after arriving from London to show it to president would President Woodrow Wilson uh Wilson's only response was good Lord so this telegram had been sent from Germany to Mexico a month before and was encoded in numeric blocks kind of like this you can see it here and when it was translated it took about

a month for the British code breaking team to translate it they found a conspiracy against the United States of America whoops went too far so sent by the German ambassadors or sorry the German Empire's foreign secretary Arthur Zimmerman to the German ambassador in Mexico the telegram would later be known colloquially as the Zimmerman Telegram and it proposed that if the United States entered the War uh World War One on the side of the Allies that Mexico should join the Central Powers and be Germany's Ally in return Germany would help Mexico with financial support in order to regain the territories that it had lost to the United States so that included Texas New Mexico and Arizona

previously the United States had been neutral in the conflict but the proposal of this alliance between Germany and Mexico which introduced the possibility of an attack directly on the United States outraged the American public and led to a big shift in public opinion towards entering the war on the side of the allies and President Wilson used this telegram the Zimmerman Telegram as justification for asking Congress to declare war on Germany in April 1917. and the revelation of the Zimmerman Telegram had a lasting impact on international relations it demonstrated the importance of cryptology and code breaking and warfare and George Fabian at the time in Riverbank Labs had the only code breaking school and team William and the

soon to be Mrs Friedman Elizabeth Smith and this is the moment that Elizabeth hadn't known but had been waiting for the moment that defines the rest of her life the fact that she was able to trust herself at 23 years old to trust her instincts about this code doesn't launch a thousand ships but does eventually save thousands of lives on ships it leads to the birth not only of the Freeman's eventual children but the birth of a new science science that we take for granted today you know cryptology touches every aspect of our lives and most humans interact with it unknowingly but at the start of the first World War uh for the United States Elizabeth and

William were maybe were two of maybe a handful literally a handful of people who understood enough about cryptology to even start looking at encrypted messages and Fabian is quick to volunteer river river bank in Elizabeth and William to the war effort in previous conflicts code Breakers hadn't mattered that much right because before the days of radio transmission and Telegraph Etc if you wanted to intercept a military message you had to you know capture the messenger on Horseback right or maybe exploit the postal system in a you know simple way but this Great War was different than previous ones because radio allowed Wireless Communications over great distances and then it also enabled anyone with a radio and a receiver to

pick up those messages that you were sending so this meant that powers on both sides of the war were also fighting to find the best ciphers and methods to encrypt what they were sending and that's where Elizabeth and William came in they were placed in charge of the riverbank division of ciphers and they would together not only become the main source of decrypting enemy messages for the United States but also create some of the seminal works that serve as the foundation for this type of work which they actually coined the term cryptanalyst to describe it in decoding coded messages the riverbank Publications most of which they worked on together even though only a few mentioned Elizabeth as a co-author

codified a lot of the knowledge that they gained through their hard study about the frequencies of letters and letter groupings in languages the index of coincidence and various methods to get around ciphers of the time that were you know all documented in these Publications and these methods are the very foundations of cryptology right take for example one of the simplest ciphers a mono alphabetic substitution Cipher or mask right so this is one where you change one letter for another so in this example for the English alphabet you change a to X B to y c to Z Etc it's one of the most basic ciphers you can think of it's mono alphabetic because the alphabet stays the same for

the entire message and these type of software ciphers can be found you know even dating back to the time of Caesar there's even a specific type of monoalphabetic Cipher a name for Caesar but even the simplest method of ciphers there are 403 septillion possible alphabets that you can create with this type of Cipher that's on the order of 10 to the 24th power or roughly on par with the number of stars in the known universe roughly rough enough so a number this large means that a thousand computers testing a million alphabets a second would take more than a billion years to try and solve for every possible alphabet yet this is also the kind of Cipher that you'd find on like

the back of a Cracker Jack box or a puzzle in the newspaper so so given the right conditions even an inexperienced person can solve this kind of Cipher so how is that even possible what's possible because we can start to identify the patterns right this is the incidence of code breaking and it's something that humans have evolved to be very very good at doing right taking what appears to be chaotic input and finding patterns in the chaos this is the most important skill of a code breaker at least definitely the most important skill at the time of Elizabeth and William it's not pure math skills it's you know Elizabeth was a poet William was a was a botanist by

training but their ability to pay attention to look for and see patterns in what appears to be a chaotic patternless environment and I'm going to return to that idea of patterns but I'm going to keep talking through Elizabeth and William's wartime efforts for for a few minutes more so their efforts in World War One were actually very well documented especially with the publication of that foundational research we were talking about in fact for the first eight months of the war Riverbank did 100 all of the code breaking for every part of the United States government the state department the war department the Navy the Department of Justice and not only that they would go on to

then be the main training ground when those various departments decided they wanted to kind of expand their own in-house code breaking capabilities you know code breaking and code making were invading every part of their lives together so even here this is a picture of them at one of those training classes they actually embedded a secret code in this picture in the style of you guessed it Francis Bacon and a b Cypher where the folks with their heads turned at an angle right it looks kind of weird got some folks with their heads turned away are the B form and then this isn't the whole photograph the photographs wider but the entire photograph spells out knowledge is power famous break and

phrase so then after the war as the government continued to see you know what code breaking meant in a modern world Elizabeth and William would actually leave Riverbank and find new careers in this field she would go work for the Coast Guard which at the time was part of the Department of the treasury and in 1927 when the government came knocking and asked her help with a new challenge and that challenge was that during prohibition illegal alcohol smuggling and distribution became a very lucrative business for organized crime groups uh so to invade law enforcement these groups would use sophisticated codes and ciphers in their Communications with their boats as they were doing rum running up from the South America

typically and the Coast Guard was uniquely positioned to help with this because they had listening stations on the coast and then Elizabeth's talents uh were critical in deciphering analyzing uh the messages that were there and exposing actually a number of critic uh criminal networks and disrupting operations she also was involved in apprehending major crime figures and provided crucial evidence in numerous legal cases her work led to successful prosecution of lots of bootlegging operations including one later run by John F Kennedy's father and she decrypted radio Transmissions between the ships and their criminal Associates to prove uh the guilt of many of these folks and throughout her tenure at the Coast Guard Friedman played a critical role in

shaping that agency's intelligence capabilities and establishing its reputation for counterintelligence laying the work for modern day code breaking and her reputation was growing as her reputation grew right newspapers started to feature prominently right because she was testifying these public cases they taught referred to her as America's first female cryptanalyst or highlighted her critical role in Breaking seemingly impenetrable codes and they were also full of a lot of focus on her as middle-aged which she really resented and almost always involved the word pretty like pretty code breaking ladies somewhere in there um so Elizabeth's Fame in the Press during this period helped kind of Raise This importance of cryptanalysts you know in law enforcement and natural

security and it also overshadowed what William was doing at the time working for the Army and William was always tormented by this fact that his hands were kind of tied when it came to sharing his work and at the same time Elizabeth was tormented by this press that she was getting that wasn't always the most flattering or focusing on the right things and she was trying to raise a young family but soon their roles would actually flip and Elizabeth would happily Fade Into the background but that change also meant that her amazing accomplishments in the next World War would be overshadowed for many years by her husband's efforts in founding a National Security Agency but

in some ways Elizabeth's work in World War II is even more unbelievable than Williams so during World War II her expertise was pivotal in identifying and apprehending Nazi spies and the description of their messages and this work was instrumental not only once the US entered the war but before they entered the war so in the Years leading up to the U.S entering and entering the war Elizabeth worked closely with British intelligence sharing her knowledge and assisting them uh because there was a huge Nazi spy ring in South America at the time and so she contributed significantly to the exposure and capture of lots of enemy agents all throughout the Western Hemisphere and during this period it was called the

silent War period before the United States was actually in as a combatant in World War II Elizabeth's work proved invaluable to fight against this kind of enemy Espionage that was happening in silent however her accomplishments were Again overshadowed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation which took credit for most if not all of her discoveries so her work was focused on deciphering encrypted messages of course sent by Nazi spies from South America to Germany and back and so they were operating both in Argentina and other countries in South America and then also some operating within the U.S she was responsible for breaking these codes and uncovering vital intelligence then led to the apprehension of these enemy agents and the Coast Guard

Crypt analytic unit that she had founded was actually who was both receiving and decrypting these messages the FBI though at the time was led by a guy named J Edgar Hoover and he was very eager to build his reputation and strength as the nation's Premier law enforcement agency and so in doing so the FBI often would take credit for the successes that Freeman and her team were making the decrypted messages were used by the FBI to apprehend spies and dismantle the networks but her role in these remained undisclosed to the public and for many years historians even credited the FBI and their field work in breaking up these spy rings and decrypting these messages and helping to

win the silent war in South America this was both because of Hoover's desire of course to promote himself in the bureau and because of the highly classified nature of Elizabeth's work but the FBI wasn't the one that intercepted these messages they didn't break the codes they didn't have a code breaking Department the Coast Guard was doing that and Elizabeth's team was doing that and once the documents behind those accomplishments were they classified it was really obvious who the vital source of the information was because every one of these documents even in the FBI Files said CG decrypt at the bottom for Coast Guard decrypt right that's something they placed on the bottom of every document when they sent it to another

agency the FBI or to the British or to the dod and so these descript decryptions uh you know they save lives they stopped cues of fascist coups in South America they um drove wedges between Germany and its would-be South American Allies um but Freeman's most notable work during World War II involved uh cracking the Enigma machine so this is an encryption device that was used by the German military to encode and decode messages it has complex settings right which everyone thought made it virtually impenetrable billions of permutations and combinations but alongside British count and parts including Alan Turing and his team at blatchery Park Freeman helped develop and devise techniques to break the Enigma code which ultimately played

obviously a critical role in the Allied victory uh and her efforts you know allowed the US to and its allies to intercept and understand enemy Communications uh was invaluable in making crucial decisions during the war and like I said saving countless lives so an example of that is that there are over 8 000 soldiers being transported upon uh in the on the Queen Mary uh and Hitler himself had put a personal bounty on the Queen Mary promising the Iron Cross and a bounty of one million reichmarks to any U-Boat captain that was able to sink her but then again following the war all of that was classified so her contributions to this were kept secret to protect her

identity and the sensitive nature of the fact that we had broken the Enigma and so it would only be many years after the war that her accomplishments were publicly recognized right and this groundbreaking work that Elizabeth did and William Freeman did in the field of cryptanalyst uh was foundational right it was the foundation of the modern National Security Agency um the pioneered efforts in code breaking and its importance in peace time and in war and William is often regarded as the father of modern American cryptology he founded What's called the Army's signal intelligence service which would uh evolve into the NSA and was responsible for intercepting and deciphering uh foreign military Communications he focused heavily on a number of

encryption machines from Japan during the war um and so those combined efforts right of the Freeman significantly influenced the US government's understanding of the Strategic value of cryptology and as the war moved into the you know after the war we moved into the Cold War area that need for an agency to handle this increasingly uh complex challenges of cryptology and signals intelligence became evident and President Harry Truman established the NSA in 1952. and the nsa's primary mission was of course and is still in theory to protect and defend the U.S national security systems and produce foreign signals intelligence um and originally the NSA had named an auditorium at Fort Meade uh after William however uh and this is this is actually

Elizabeth um at that dedication with a bust of her husband when they dedicated that Auditorium but later on after Elizabeth's death it became you know public information that she contributed so much to this effort as well and that her work probably deserved equal recognition and so in response to that the NSA actually took the decision to rename the auditorium it now honors both William and Elizabeth and this change underscores the agencies in our uh understanding and acknowledgment of the significant contributions made by both of the Freemans in the field of Crypt analysts and so that that renaming you know serves as a testament I think to both Elizabeth and Williams uh Collective Legacy in cryptology and also highlights

I think the importance of recognizing often over overlooked work of female code Breakers and cryptanalysts uh whose efforts were instrumental in shaping the course of history and the development of modern intelligence practices and furthermore the Freeman's work went beyond their professional careers they both dedicated themselves to the education and mentorship of future Crypt analysts and their commitments to nurturing that talent and sharing knowledge created this kind of robust and skilled Workforce in cryptology that's of course continued to evolve in the ever-changing landscape of Global Security threats so that's the story of Elizabeth but what can we kind of take away from all this how does this kind of Tangled history of you know the works of

Shakespeare leading to an incorrect theory about who authored them uh to the founding of one of the greatest code breaking security organs Focus organizations we heard about this morning from Dr Greene how does that all tie into what we're doing today and and help us think about how do we secure our future together so I think I think the lessons are these I think they're crucial for understanding uh both the current and future cyber security landscape and will help us better protect ourselves and organizations against threats and they go back to the principles that I think Elizabeth used uh in helping to find found this uh this science so first let's look at the concept of

interdisciplinary thinking and problem solving so you know in today's world we've just heard from cat and I'm hurt we've heard in lots of talks today about how evolving cyber threats are and then they can be increasing complexity leading to you know the idea that we have to think a lot differently right gone are the days where there's you know one root user or you could rely on a single technology or a single method to secure an organization the most effective cyber security strategies today incorporate a diverse set of tools techniques drawing on the experience of multiple Fields right incorporating other disciplines like psychology and sociology and economics and into a cyber security strategy can provide valuable insights into you know

what are the motivations behind attackers and how does this impact their behavior this allows you to anticipate and mitigate threats you know more effectively so by fostering this culture of interdisciplinary collaboration within an organization I think you can find you know a holistic approach to problem solving that helps tackle you know today's threats the second key I think and this is something that Elizabeth did her whole career is you know thinking like your adversary think like an attacker you know in order to really defend against threats effectively you have to understand that mindset and the tactics that your adversaries are using right there we if we go back to uh her code breaking uh in World War II uh or in the

silent War World War II uh there was actually a famous novel that all of the Nazi spies were using um in order to be the like seed for their encryption and so she started to learn like what parts of that novel people liked more and and what parts they would be more likely to start from so adopting that attacker's perspective when evaluating your own security posture is definitely one of the most effective things that you can do to evaluate the effectiveness of that posture you have to ask questions like how would I try to exploit this system what would be the most valuable Target if I was attacking it and that can uncover potential vulnerabilities that

might not have been immediate immediately apparent if you're just you know starting from that posture and then again I think you know we heard about it before but conducting regular threat assessments and penetration tests that help you simulate simulate what a real world attack looks like um identifies areas where your defense is lacking and that creates a proactive approach to security and not an assumption of security and the third takeaway is to not over assume right to know that nothing is impenetrable right the the Titanic was Unsinkable the Enigma was impenetrable but no matter how robust your security measures will be well we heard this morning from Dr Green that you know 128-bit encryption or a thousand twenty

bit encryption was unbreakable and then we found out it was broken so no matter how robust your security measures may be you know there's going to always be an attention a potential for an attacker to find a way in and so it's crucial to constantly evaluate where you're at and adopt that mindset of continuous learning and Improvement right we heard of training and continuous learning from cat just recently and so by regularly challenging your own security measures you're going to be able to identify and address you know where there are issues you know where there have been internal or external attempts to breach your security and then things like bug Bounty programs that can incentivize or security

researchers to do the same are going to really help you take a look at your system from the outside in and so by embracing this idea that no security uh plan is perfect you create this culture of vigilance and resilience and I think the most important thing that we can take away um from Elizabeth's life is to speak up when something doesn't feel right right speak up when you're seeing you know compliance uh as security or you know complacence with compliance right this final takeaway is the need to address this idea of being complacent with compliance you know far too often organizations are relying on their you know compliance standards as the primary security measure and of course you know

we're in an area where compliance with regulations and standards is critical for organizations but it shouldn't be mistaken for a comprehensive security strategy you know that complacence with compliance can lead to a false sense of security leaving your organization actually more vulnerable to cyber threats that aren't addressed through existing regulations and so it's important to go beyond the minimum requirements and proactively Implement security measures and it's most important that when you notice that the focus is more on ticking the boxes of compliance rather than addressing real security concerns that you're not afraid to speak up right you're not afraid to say what might be sacrilegious you're not afraid to educate your colleagues on the importance of robust security

measures and the potential consequences of not adopting them instead bearing your hands in the heads in the sand of compliance and that will help ensure your organization you know remains resilient against evolving security threats right that's the idea that started Elizabeth's career this this pattern recognition we can think about how important that human element still is to this day it's it's interesting to me how Full Circle we've come actually um you know originally Elizabeth was using pencil and paper to solve these complex puzzles and codes using her own unique ability to identify patterns and then of course you know today the opposite is somewhat true right cryptology is based in some of the most advanced math that we've just yet

developed as a species yet what are we coming back to right we're circling back to this idea of artificial intelligence which in its current form you know machine learning large language models boils down to trying to reproduce that thing that humans are better at and best at right pattern recognition and so I think that'll change the way we work but I don't think humans and our ability to speak up and see problems with patterns is going to go away anytime soon so in these four ways by you know fostering interdisciplinary thinking and problem solving speaking up when it's complacents with compliance uh thinking like an attacker remembering that nothing's impenetrable you'll be able to significantly improve your

organization's cyber security posture and when you do you take a minute to thank Elizabeth Smith Freeman her remarkable accomplishments in the field of cryptanalysts Crypt analysis have left an indelible mark on you know the history of cryptology and code breaking in general uh but her work was also invaluable in trailblazing you know in in starting a science and and was matched maybe only by her husband although he would say otherwise and her experience or her expertise and dedication paved the way for future generations of cryptanalysts but also demonstrated the importance of cryptology in protecting the most powerful thing knowledge and that is unsurprisingly what she had inscribed on William's Tombstone when he passed away in 1969. again we see the

phrase at the bottom here that came to find both of their lives knowledge is power but this is Elizabeth Smith Freeman we're talking about the woman who would write her kids letters at camp in ciphertext who threw a dinner party once where the menu was encoded and one of the dishes was called a dish mixed together in an Inseparable way it was a hash and you know play on the word yeah uh so she couldn't let a simple thing like a tombstone not have a secret code embedded right so the letters that spell out knowledge is power she actually um specified which would have serifs and not to make a bi-formed alphabet right making it a famous a b bakonian Cipher

uh and at Betty Williams initials uh again in the tombstone at the bottom so while cryptologists like all mere mortals will die one day their impact on society and indeed their hidden messages can go on much longer so as we wrap up I encourage each of you to reflect on these key takeaways you know think about cyber security as an ongoing journey and see how you can adopt those principles right they're they're critical for understanding both current and future State uh and how you can protect your organization so thank you so much for your time today and for those who came expecting bacon that's all I got for you um but hopefully even if you didn't get

the bacon you were looking for you were able to start thinking about what it means to be a modern security engineer and in the end that should be able to bring home some bacon for you okay sorry no I had to do that one thank you thanks and if you want to uh find out more about this presentation or even better read the book that inspired this talk call the women that smashed codes you can find a link to that at nux.gg bacon uh and then you can also join the project Discovery Discord if you want to chat more I'm on there all the time and find me on the internet at O'Leary crew most places thanks again

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