Thursday, October 23, 2008

Historia - The Information Security in the Middle Ages

Ok, so this is my first post in english, sorry for my grammatical errors !!!
Among the centuries V and XV Europe lived in the dark ages. While the Middle East flourished in the knowledge and the Muslims invented the cryptoanalisis in ocidente all the information was monopolized by the church. The monasteries are the databases where they were stored knowledge of man.

And who possesses the information has the power, the church that had the monopoly of knowledge only allowed access to a select group of monks. These monks in monasteries had confined the work of copying the ancient Greek works, many of them against of the church ideas.

The access to such information and disseminate it could lead to the person to be charged for heresy and end in a court inquisitor.

But even in these dark times there were people who search the knowledge, these were the Franciscan monks.

In contrast to the monastic orders, dedicated to the contemplative life in monasteries, this order was dedicated to coexistence in the secular world and sought to defend the Christian faith by preaching and by the use of reason.

A perfect example of information security at the Middle Age is given in the movie "The Name of the Rose."

A summary of the argument:

In the winter of the year 1327, under the papacy of John XXII, Adso of Melk and his teacher William of Baskerville come to an abbey, famous for his impressive library with strict access rules, located in the Italian Alps for a meeting between Delegates of the Pope and the Emperor and be able to discuss the alleged heresy of a branch of the Franciscans: the spiritual.

However, this meeting is threatened by a series of murders that appear to follow the pattern of a passage of the Apocalypse. Guillermo and Adso, breaks the rules in many moments , trying to solve the murders

In the following passages of the film we see the safety standards of the monastery to protect the information contained in the library and as it is "hacked".

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We can make a parallel between the characters of the movie and the present.

Let's say that the Library is a Database.

The Librarian is the Firewall (obviously with very strict rules only said "NO" ;-))

Adso of Melk and his teacher William of Baskerville are the first hackers.

In the early scenes they are doing a recognition of the objective , then try to access the database and are rejected by the firewall and finally found a backdoor and get the prize.

Is a very geek interpretation, but this book is excellent!

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