History of Cryptography

When a fellow general received the message, he would wrap the paper around his corresponding scytale to decipher the message (Tyson 2014). Since the advent of computers though, encryption has become increasing important and relies almost solely on cryptographic means to secure information. When speaking about encryption today, it refers more to the process rather than the mathematical formulas used to scramble data. The basic idea behind encrypting a computer message is such that it is scrambled with a sequence of random bits, known as a key, and only parties with the corresponding key can transpose it back into a comprehensible format. These keys are created via a cipher, otherwise known as an algorithm. When a user sends a message, known as the plaintext, across a network, the computer applies an algorithm to the information to encode it, resulting in a ciphertext (Encryption Basics 2014). This method can be best summarized visually:

During World War II, the Germans used a type of code that is almost impossible to break. They used this code to communicate between each other and would get directions of where to go and also state where their locations are through that code. What made that code unique was the way that they used it. The way their code worked would be that someone would write a letter in a machine, and then the machine would print a coded version of the message. But that was not the worst part of it. At the end of every day, they would change the key to the messages, all at the same time in a synchronized manner. The way that the Enigma machine was built made it even more complicated to understand. “There are approximately 150,000,000,000,000 - that is, 150 million million - possible combination” (Claire Ellis “Exploring the Enigma”). Alan Turing started working in a

Type of operations used for transforming plaintext to cipher text. All encryption algorithms are based on two general principles. Those are substitution, in which each element in the plain text is mapped into another element and transposition in which elements in the plaintext are rearranged. The fundamental requirement is that no information be lost. Most systems referred to as product systems, involved multiple stages of substitution and transposition [2].

The best analysis tool to break the Caesar cipher is histogram because it performs a statistical analysis on cipher text which shows the frequency of each letter used in the file. This can later be compared and matched to the frequency of letters in the English language.

Begging with a decryption unit at a telegraph station in 1917 during World War I. The what was once named the Cipher Bureau of the Military Intelligence Division (MID), slowly

During World War 2 was a time of devastation. It was also a great time of innovation. One of the greatest innovations was the beginning of modern computing. During World War 2 encryption was each army’s main way of keeping war plans secure. One of the most famous encrypting machines was named the Enigma. The Enigma was a machine that took input from one side; encrypts it and sends the message to another operator who then translates it using a code book (Gladwin). Using this machine, the German’s kept nearly all the information secure from other countries. To break these encryptions, the British secret service along with many other countries started to build machines that could defeat the Enigmas encryption (Gladwin). Soon after the Germans

Nearly 2000 years ago, Caesar was planning to expand his empire , he needed a way of communication his battle plans to his team without the enemy finding out , so he would write the message to his team in code for example he will write the letter ‘D’ instead of the letter ‘A’ and when he got to the end of alphabet , he would have to go back to the beginning , so instead of ‘Z’ he would write ‘B’ and instead of ‘Y’ he would write ‘A’ .

Cryptography, at least in some form, has been around since 1900 BC where the first known evidence had been seen in an Egyptian tomb of a nobleman, Khnuhotep II. Here, there are unusual hieroglyphic symbols that the scribe used in the place of more ordinary ones that one would expect. It is thought that the purpose of changing these symbols, it was not to hide the message, but make it seem like it was more dignified. However, evidence of cryptography has been traced back to the most of the major early civilizations. Arthasharta, an ancient Indian treatise, helps tell of an espionage service and mentions secret writing that their spies had used on assignements. Julias Caesar also had his very own cipher. It was a form of encryption to relay secret messages to his generals that were on the war front. It is a substitution cipher, and the most widely mentioned in history. A substitution cipher is where a plain text message would have each character

The most effective tool to decipher a Caesar cipher encrypted text would be the histogram. The histogram provides a visual presentation of the letters used in the text. The user can see the frequency of letter usage from the graph, identify which letter was the most common, and be able to calculate how many shifts were applied. E is the most commonly used letter of the alphabet (Savarese & Hart, 1999). It is highly likely that E represents the letter with the highest number of appearances. Common words that end in ING, LY, or ES also provide clues to letter placement (Braingle: Caesar Cipher, n.d.). By identifying a simple word such as “the”, the user can mark the letter E in place of the most frequent letter used and identify the

Protecting data through cryptography from unauthorized eyes is a high priority for organizations that store personal information. Cryptography is the process of hiding the real meaning of a message through a pre-determined code that is only known to the person encrypting and decrypting a message. Different forms of cryptography can be seen in our everyday life from the word puzzle in daily newspapers to secretaries writing in short hand. Cryptography has been around since the time of the Egyptians and has made many advances through the years.

Over the years, cryptography has been used to protect secrets, in a military capacity to make sure that either hackers, enemies of the countries, do not intercept sensitive formation. Ciphers, and encryption blocks are becoming so hard to break even the best super computers cannot break the codes in a timely fashion. Encryption has been improved over the years, also has been around for thousands of years and this paper is intended to explain about different forms of cryptography that either has been used or is still in use to this day. This paper is about

How did it work: The enigma machine was a very complicated device. On the inside of the machine there were three rotors that contained all 26 letters of the alphabet. What would happen was that when someone would press a letter on the keyboard, a different letter would pop up on the paper, such as A for E, D for G, F for Z, and so on. These substitutions occur because of the positions of the rotors on the inside of the machine. The rotors are first situated at any random letter in the alphabet and when the button is

There are weak encryption and strong encryption. Caesars method is known as weak encryption because it can be deciphered. Deciphering a code without authorization is known as “cracking” a code. In order to crack the simple substitution code, you could make twenty-five different transformation tales where each of them has a different offset. Strong encryption, the opposite of weak encryption, is very tough to crack. By using expensive, specialized, code-breaking computers, strong encryptions methods can be broken. Also, encryption methods can be broken by the use of supercomputers, mainframe computers, workstations and personal computers. The codes can be broken using these computers by using the brute-force method, which consists of trying all of the possible keys (Parsons 329).

Steganography is the science of hiding a secret message or data inside another text, image, audio or video file. It has been in use since ancient times. The distinguishing factors in the steganography techniques used back then and at present, is the medium to carry the secret data and the various algorithms which have been designed for it. We intend to uncover the pros and cons of these various steganography techniques, which use different mediums to carry the secret data.

The earliest application of data communication in video games came from multiplayer gaming. Originally, and even in some instances today, the term multiplayer in games meant that players were in the same room sharing a physical console. Two of the earliest examples of this were in 1972 the game “Pong” and “MIT SpaceWar” on the Atari, which featured two joysticks to play the games (White, 2009). A few years later, as technology continued advancing, the term multiplayer developed different meanings. By the late 70s many of the country’s universities were linked through the modern internet’s predecessor ARPANET (The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) also known as “pre-internet.” ARPANET connected universities through computer