The beginning of cryptography was
when humans spoke their first words. Even to this day a language can be
considered a form of cryptography because if you don’t know the language
another person is speaking you will have no idea what secrets they are talking
about. This accounts for the use of written language as well since a majority of
people, up until recently, were not able to read. Speaking and writing are
easily breakable nowadays though. The Egyptian hieroglyphs could be considered
a form of cryptography too as it used pictures to hide their stories. The first
use of algorithms to secure a message was created by the Greeks who came up
with the Spartan Scytale around 7th century B.C. Rods of different diameter
were used to wrap a strip of parchment around it on which a message was
written. The Caesar Cipher appeared during, you guessed it, Julius Caesar’s
rule and was used for war (as was the Scytale). The Caesar Cipher, a
monoalphabetic cipher, used simple substitution as a form of confusion. There
was little advancement in cryptography until the Middle Ages but the Arabs did
make headway in cryptoanalysis by using frequency analysis.
In the
1500’s, Leon Battista Alberi, “The Father of Western Cryptology,” developed
polyalphabetic substitution. Polyalphabetic uses multiple alphabets to hide the
plaintext by allowing different ciphertext symbols to represent the same
plaintext symbol. During the 16th century, Blaise de Vigènere made
improvements to polyalphabetic substitution which was used until the Civil War.
Around WWI codebook ciphers and the one-time pad showed up. The one-time pad
was started by Gilbert Vernam and improved by Joseph Mauborgne. In the case of
the one-time pad, if the key is truly random and used only once then it provides
perfect secrecy. Arthur Scheribus invented the Enigma machine at the end of
WWI, it was used commercially at first and then improved by the German
government for use in WWII. The machine was broken by a Polish cryptologist,
Marian Rejewksi, and his work was transferred over to Alan
Turing and the code breakers at Bletchley Park to build Bombes which were
electromechanical machines that were designed specifically to break Enigma.
More info on different cryptography systems here.
Sander, your post was very informational. Indeed, when we think about it, language is another type cryptography. It still is today. I think that it is interesting how many of cryptography was born and use for war. This shows how powerful information can be. With the correct information, war can be overturn. Today, information is still a powerful thing, and cryptography still exists within our computer today. An example of this is the encryption of password to keep is secure from any hackers.
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