do you know anyone who works in finance/banking who knows about encryption of financial documents? This is for an academic research paper, whereby I would be interested to research further information about encryption that was used in financial documents i.e. before David Chaum's blind signature research that developed into further encryption techniques. So I mean pre-1970s encryption/cryptography/steganography techniques. Anyone who may know more,or articles/experts in this field who are knowledgeable of cryptography and ciphers used in financial documents in that particular time period, please give me a guide or let me know where I could look further!
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4$\begingroup$ Please clarify the scope, especially the time period and perhaps "financial documents". Would the 1970s (generally acknowledged to be the rise of symmetric encryption/authentication, especially of the Data Encryption Standard in processing of banking transactions) be in scope? Also, why would David Chaum's blind signature (1983) be a relevant landmark? $\endgroup$– fgrieu ♦Commented Feb 6, 2022 at 14:42
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- In the nineteenth century telegraphic communications between banks were typically secured by the case of codebooks. Here's a link to an example from the Bank of Montreal.
- The Enigma machine was supposedly originally developed in 1918 by Arthur Scherbius for the protection of banking communications.
- In chapter 22 of his book "The Codebreakers" David Kahn says that Elizabeth Friedman was employed by the IMF to set up a cryptographic system based around the one-time pad. He also notes that as late as 1958 banks were using codebooks rather than machine encipherment (describing one episode of insider threat enabled this).
- In the 1960s the IBM Cryptography Research Group in Yorktown Heights, NY was set up which would eventually lead to Horst Feistel's work on block ciphers, including the Lucifer cipher (forerunner to the Data Encryption Standard DES) which was used to secure Lloyd's Bank ATMs in 1971. The second chapter of Stephen Levy's book "Crypto" covers some of this work.
