History of Cryptography:
The Automatic business of the Roster State Corporation is helping to build the first cryptography museum in Russia, which will welcome visitors the following year, together with the Kryptonite Research and Production Company. The primary goal of the museum, according to its architects, is to pique visitors’ interest in current technology and science by discussing cryptography and associated scientific and technological subjects. The information is all under “Automation” for this. Since the 1940s, the company has specialized on cryptography. The nation’s top cryptographers have been employed here for the whole period.
However, cryptography has been around for more than a thousand years and has firmly established itself in contemporary life. Today, it is hard to conceive mobile communications, instant messaging, or financial activities without encryption. In our content, we talk about the past and future of the encryption industry.
Ancient civilizations’ hidden writing
Behind the pseudoscientific term “cryptography,” which literally translates to “secret writing” in ancient Greek, is the desire to keep sensitive information hidden from inquisitive eyes. We might claim that since writing was first used by a small group of individuals to transmit knowledge that was inaccessible to illiterate people, writing it was already a form of cryptography. The growth of writing created a demand for increasingly advanced encryption techniques. Since the dawn of human civilization, cryptography has dependably served the needs of the armed forces, government agents, businesspeople, and guardians of religious knowledge.
Scientists believe that an ancient Egyptian papyrus with a list of monuments from the reign of Pharaoh Amenemhat II represents the earliest evidence of the usage of the cypher (dating back to around 4000 BC). The well-known hieroglyphs were altered by the unidentified author, but most likely not to conceal information but rather to make a bigger impression on the reader.
Surgical papyrus fragment, one of the most significant ancient Egyptian medical books
The prehistoric Semitic at bash, which dates to around 600 BC, is another well-known cypher. Here, the information was muddled in the most straightforward way possible by using alphabetical letter substitutions. There are at bash-related cryptograms in the Bible.
And in ancient Sparta, a piece of paper was wrapped around a cylinder that served as a travelling cypher. On parchment, the text was inscribed line by line. When the tape was unwound, the writing became a cypher that could only be deciphered with a cylinder of the same diameter. The Spartan Wanderer is regarded as one of the earliest cryptographic systems.
Aeneas the Tactician, a military treatise author, invented the encryption disc that would eventually bear his name in the fourth century BC. Disc holes had letters marked next to them, and a thread was systematically threaded into each one to record a message. It was just necessary to drag the thread backwards in order to read the writing. The device’s biggest drawback was that any literate individual could decipher the encryption given enough time. On the other side, it was simply required to rip out the thread or destroy the device to instantly “delete” information on Aeneas’s disc.
Caesar cypher with a three-shift: A is changed to D, B to E, and so forth. Z is changed to C.
The Caesar cypher is one of the first known cyphers (circa 100 BC). His approach was fairly straightforward: each letter of the original text was changed by a different one, put a set number of positions off from it alphabetically. It was feasible to break the cypher using this number and learn the secrets Caesar’s generals were given.
Many ancient peoples employed encryption, but Arab scientists had exceptional success with cryptography even in our time. The Arabs were able to not only build their own cyphers but also decipher others due to the high degree of advancement in mathematics and linguistics. As a result, the first scholarly writings on cryptanalysis—the process of decrypting communications without the key—appears. The period of “naive” cryptography, in which cyphers were more akin to puzzles, is now over.
Numerology, gibberish, and other cyphers
Arab scientists’ research helped lead to the development of more difficult-to-decrypt polyalphabetic cyphers, which employed many alphabets simultaneously. However, individuals in the middle Ages still used straightforward cyphers that involved swapping out letters for numerals or other letters, misreading letters, etc. In Europe throughout the middle Ages, it was thought that magic and the Kabbalah were intimately intertwined.
It’s noteworthy to note that ancient Russia had its own hidden writing systems, such as littoral, which had two categories: simple and smart. Some letters in the cipher’s clever rendition were changed to dots, sticks, or circles. All of the Cyrillic alphabet’s consonants were grouped in two rows in a single littoral, often known as a nonsense letter. By switching out the letters in one row for those in another, the message was encrypted.
Stiffer, which substituted numbers for letters, syllables, and words, was another well-known cypher used in Ancient Russia. It was challenging to decipher cyphers that included mathematical processes, such as “The decimal and the five by the quaternary, the unit by the quaternary and the decimal two.”
Based on the numerical values of Church Slavonic letters, 16th-century secret writing
Cryptography is becoming more popular throughout the Renaissance. Beginning with the appearance of codified, more dependable cyphers, the era of formal cryptography starts. Later cryptographers spent ages trying to solve some of the puzzles of the Renaissance scientists.
Italian scientist Leon Alberta creates an encryption disc with exterior and internal components around the year 1466. On a fixed external drive were written the letters and numerals. The letters and numbers were also on the inner moveable disc, which was also the key to the cypher and held them in a different order. Finding the desired letter of the text on the external drive and replacing it with the letter on the internal drive that was under it were necessary for encryption. The inner disc was then moved, and the newly encrypted letter was then decrypted from the new location. As a result, the Alberta cypher, which was founded on the combinatory principle, became one of the earliest polyalphabetic substitution cyphers. . The “Treatise on Ciphers,” one of the earliest scholarly books on cryptography, was also written by Leon Alberta.
Disc with encryption by Leon Alberta
Here, it is important to bring up the phenomena of steganography, which was also included in Alberta’s research. Steganography enables you to conceal the mere process of transferring or storing data if someone is attempting to conceal the meaning of information with the use of a cypher. That is, you will mistake the text concealed using this technique for a picture, a recipe, a grocery list, or something else, like a crossword puzzle. If it’s written with milk, lemon juice, or special inks, you won’t even be able to see it. Steganography and encryption techniques were frequently integrated in a single communication.
The book “Polygraphs” by abbot Johannes Trithemius, published in 1518, was a breakthrough in cryptography and includes information on cyphers with polyalphabetic substitution. The French diplomat and alchemist Braised Veneer, who created a completely secure cypher that employed 26 alphabets and required knowledge of the password to operate, is considered to be the most prominent cryptographer of the 16th century. We may infer that the Vigenère encryption combined a number of the Caesar cyphers that have already been presented.
The Cipher Machine Era
Cryptography was not ignored by the industrial revolution. Thomas Jefferson, one of the country’s founding fathers, developed a disc encryption in 1790 that became known as the Jefferson cylinder. This rotary-based gadget, which was the first cryptographic tool of the New Age, allowed for the automation of the encryption process.
Franklin D. Roosevelt Cipher Cylinder
The development of the telegraph had a significant impact on the encryption industry. The previous cyphers abruptly stopped functioning, but the demand for strong encryption only grew as a result of several significant military engagements. The military sector provided the primary impetus for the development of cryptography during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Play fair cypher, which is based on the encryption of bigrams, or pairings of characters, has been used by the British military since 1854. The usage of this cypher continued up until the start of World War II.
During World War II, adversaries were already employing transportable electromechanical cyphers, which were thought to be uncrackable. The gadgets either rotated or were on discs. The renowned Enigma machine employed by the Nazis was among the first; the American M-209 machine was among the second.
Enigma worked on the basis that one or more rotors would spin whenever a key associated with a letter of the alphabet was pressed. The letter was altered numerous times in accordance with the Caesar cipher’s concept, and the outcome was shown in the window. Given that there are 15 quadrillion possible possibilities, the Enigma cyphers are thought to be the hardest to decipher. Nevertheless, the Enigma code was cracked, first by Polish cryptographers in 1932 and later by English scientist Alan Turing, who developed the Bomb, a device for decrypting Enigma messages. The British made a significant contribution by using a network of 210 similar computers to decrypt up to 3,000 Nazi military signals daily to the triumph of the Allies.
Since information on Soviet cypher machines remained secret until recently, hardly much is known about them. For instance, the Falk rotating encryption device was in use in the USSR and its allies until the 1990s. It utilized 10 rotors, as opposed to the “Enigma” and other devices, and the data was presented on a paper tape.
Everyone may use cryptography
The Theory of Communication in Secret Systems, written by Claude Shannon in 1949, marks cryptography’s official entrance into mathematics. Block cypher systems, which needed the usage of digital electrical equipment, had largely superseded rotary cypher systems by the end of the 1960s. The Code breakers, a best-selling book by physicist David Kahn, were released in 1967 and greatly increased interest in cryptography.
The use of computers has increased the degree of cryptography. You can build cyphers that are orders of magnitude more complicated thanks to the capabilities of modern technology. Computers now communicate via cyphers or codes, and cryptography is a fully fledged sector of the economy. The DES encryption standard, which was created in 1978, served as the foundation for many contemporary cryptographic techniques.
While trying to keep control over the usage of cyphers, several governments are trying to restrict the reach of cryptography. The work of cryptographers is kept secret, and producers of encryption equipment must include “back doors” that may be accessed by specialized services.
Parallel to this, independent cryptanalysts are creating open cryptography—encryption techniques that anybody may utilize. With the emergence of the Internet, where the issue of information secrecy has grown extremely severe, this has gained particular relevance. The RSA algorithm, whose name is an abbreviation for the initials of its authors Rivers, Shamir, and Adelman, was developed in 1977 and is regarded as the first public key cryptosystem. Additionally, American programmer Philip Zimmerman created the most well-known open source PGP email encryption suite in 1991.
Without encryption, it is impossible to imagine how the accessible Internet would have expanded over the globe. With the introduction of instant messengers, social networks, online shops, and government agency websites, there is a constant and massive transmission of personal information over the internet. Today, we use cryptography on a daily basis when we log into an email account, check the progress of an online order, or transfer money via a bank app. The most complicated cryptosystems today are a far cry from the ancient cyphers that were just a few letters long. . The next revolution in encryption will emerge with the introduction of quantum supercomputers, whose research is currently under way. This science’s future is unfolding right before our eyes.
