I was watching 24 the other night and Blowfish Encryption caught my attention. I started wondering to myself if that was even a real thing. You know like how doctors in shows like Grey’s Anatomy and ER do fake CPR? Turns out Blowfish is a real thing, so here is my version of “Blowfish for Dummies”. To make a computer do anything, you would have to write a program, basically give it a task. An algorithm (aka cipher) tells the program how to do the task. So here is an easy example. I am going to wash my car-that is my program. There are lots of ways to get my car washed: 1. Go to the car wash. 2. Do it with a hose in my driveway. 3. Pay a neighbor kid to do it for me. The way I choose to get my car clean is the algorithm or a cipher. In cryptography, Blowfish is a keyed, symmetric block cipher, designed in 1993 by Bruce Schneier. There is no record of anyone ever “breaking” a Blowfish code. So my curiosity got the better of me when Morris found a “backdoor” and that is how he broke the encrypted message sent from Rene to Jack. A backdoor is basically a way the original developer of the code can break the code by entering through a back door they themselves created. Most often it’s someone’s birthday or their dogs name and so on. Turns out there is no back door for Blowfish and I know this because its creator Bruce Schneier has a blog of his own, loves 24 and has been blogging about it since Monday night. If you go to his site-it is both informative and hilarious. Those guys are talking so far over my head! As in the Gary Larsen cartoon where 2 mathematicians taped a paper with a math problem on it to the 3 mathematicians back. The rest of us aren’t even smart enough to know why it is so funny! The long and the short of it is, Blowfish is real, there is no back door and it has never been broken which begs the question how would Rene have gotten the key to Jack so he could open it? Cipher isn’t a new idea-quite old actually, in fact it goes back as far as the Greeks. They would use ciphers, specific codes that involve subsitutions or shifting information. For example here is a cipher with a grid of letters and numbers:
1 2 3 4 5
1 A B C D E
2 F G H I/J K
3 L M N O P
4 Q R S T U
5 V W X Y Z
If a Spartan general wished to send the message I AM SPARTA to another general, he would write this series of numbers:

42 11 23 34 53 11 24 44 11

  As long as both generals had the correct cipher, they could decode any message the other sent.   And that is Blowfish for Dummies. And I only barely understand the tip of this so if I have made mistakes or someone smarter than me wants to correct me-please feel free to comment. And last but not least I want you all to know I voted for Jack Bauer for President.