Up to the Second World War, most of the work on cryptography was for military purposes, usually used to hide secret military information. The Enigma machine's cipher was eventually broken by Poland and the technology was later transferred to the British cryptographers who designed a means for obtaining the daily key. In this case the key was the initial setting of the rotors. The rotors rotate at different rates as you type on the keyboard and output appropriate letters of cipher text. The Enigma machine used 3 or 4 or even more rotors. The Engima machine was invented by German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I, and was heavily used by the German forces during the Second World War. This was again broken by using letter frequencies. This also rotated the disc by one notch and a different table would then be used for the next plain text character. The key encoded a substitution table and each key press from the keyboard resulted in the output of cipher text. It uses a single rotor, in which the secret key is embedded in a rotating disc. Comparing this to Caesar cipher, the secrecy of the message depends on the secrecy of the encryption key, rather than the secrecy of the system.Īt the start of the 19th century when everything became electric, Hebern designed an electro-mechanical contraption which was called the Hebern rotor machine. (Modulo, or mod, is a mathematical expression in which you calculate the remainder of a division when one number is divided by another.) As with the Caesar cipher, Vigenere's cipher can also easily be broken however, Vigenere's cipher brought the very idea of introducing encryption keys into the picture, though it was poorly executed. In one of his ciphers, the encryption key was repeated multiple times spanning the entire message, and then the cipher text was produced by adding the message character with the key character modulo 26. In fact, substitution ciphers can be broken by using the frequency of letters in the language.ĭuring the 16th century, Vigenere designed a cipher that was supposedly the first cipher which used an encryption key. Once the system is known, these encrypted messages can easily be decrypted. It is easy to see that such ciphers depend on the secrecy of the system and not on the encryption key. The characters would wrap around at the end, so 'X' would be replaced by 'A'. Each character was shifted by 3 places, so the character 'A' was replaced by 'D', 'B' was replaced by 'E', and so on. The variant used by Caesar was a shift by 3 cipher. (A cipher is an algorithm used for encryption or decryption.) In a substitution cipher, each character of the plain text (plain text is the message which has to be encrypted) is substituted by another character to form the cipher text (cipher text is the encrypted message). This substitution cipher, known as Caesar cipher, is perhaps the most mentioned historic cipher in academic literature. " Arthshashtra", a classic work on statecraft written by Kautalya, describes the espionage service in India and mentions giving assignments to spies in "secret writing" - sounds like an ancient version of James Bond?įast forwarding to around 100 BC, Julius Caesar was known to use a form of encryption to convey secret messages to his army generals posted in the war front. Evidence of some use of cryptography has been seen in most major early civilizations. Though the inscription was not a form of secret writing, but incorporated some sort of transformation of the original text, and is the oldest known text to do so. The purpose was not to hide the message but perhaps to change its form in a way which would make it appear dignified. The scribe used some unusual hieroglyphic symbols here and there in place of more ordinary ones. The first known evidence of the use of cryptography (in some form) was found in an inscription carved around 1900 BC, in the main chamber of the tomb of the nobleman Khnumhotep II, in Egypt. Though it has been used for thousands of years to hide secret messages, systematic study of cryptology as a science (and perhaps an art) just started around one hundred years ago.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |