It is no secret that there are strong ties between art, science and our cognition. Douglas Hofstadter, in his excellent “Gödel, Escher, Bach” was not the first, yet maybe the most poignant writer to enlighten us on this topic. Art and especially music require a deep fundamental understanding of formal logic and mathematical rules. It does not come as a surprise then, that Peter Schweitzer, the late Chief Cryptanalyst at Revere Security, was both a genial mathematician and a highly skilled musician. Admitted into Harvard College at the tender age of 16, he had completed his master’s in math by the time he was 22. In parallel, he almost completed a B.A. in music and, later in life, channeled his creative energy into the photography of performing arts (click here for more information).

 

Peter’s role during the design of Hummingbird had been crucial. Working off of Eric Smith’s original design for Hummingbird, Peter had been involved in every innovation that followed. For example, when Eric struggled to find a suitable block cipher to incorporate into the Hummingbird overall architecture, Peter made the connection between the problem and a block cipher design (WD-16) from Dr. Whitfield Diffie. Peter managed to apply the design to Hummingbird. In fact it was Peter who named the Revere Security cipher as Hummingbird.

 

Throughout the process of designing and improving the Hummingbird cipher, Peter’s genius and perseverance were an enormous success factor. Hummingbird eventually evolved from the early designs into an altogether new class of cipher that is now based on a truly hybrid design: neither a block nor stream cipher. It combined all the advantages of a both block and stream ciphers while not having the disadvantages of either. This insight became a crucial turning point during the Hummingbird design process and led to a hyper efficient cipher especially suited for resource-constrained environments.

 

Peter was the first on the team to recognize the unique features and benefits of the hybrid design for Hummingbird. However, he was also the first to know that any new cryptographic design needs to be examined by as many experts as possible in order to gain confidence in its cryptanalytic strength. Under Peter’s direction Hummingbird was intensely cryptanalyzed by an organization called Information Security Systems Inc. (ISSI), which was founded by the legendary NSA cryptanalyst Jim Frazer. Based on the subsequent results of ISSI’s work, Hummingbird began to take its final shape. Many of the improvements that were made during this phase were based on Peter’s ideas.

 

Today it is impossible to say where Hummingbird would be without Peter Schweitzer’s contribution. There were far too many novel, innovative and creative inputs to imagine that others could have made them and ultimately, it is not clear that anyone else would have been in the same unique position that Peter was in. All of us at Revere Security were deeply saddened when we learned that Peter Schweitzer had passed away on October 13, 2011 after suffering a stroke. He will be missed and certainly not forgotten.