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"New Attacks Breach Computer Codes", by Charles Seife. Science, 1 November 1996, pages 716-717.
Cryptographic codes are used for insuring the safe transmission of all kinds of information, from banking transactions to sensitive military data. Often these codes rely on the difficulty of undoing certain mathematical operations, such as multiplying together two large prime numbers. Researchers who work on the security of such codes put a lot of effort into trying to crack them, to test their vulnerability. They have found that the foibles of computer operations can often provide hints about the codes being used. For example, irradiating a chip can introduce errors in the encoding, and those errors provide clues that can be used to discover the code.
-Allyn Jackson
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