the.com/cryptography
The ancient art of whispering across a room everyone is listening to.
means The practice of encoding messages so that only the intended recipient can read them, while everyone else sees gibberish.
from From the Greek 'kryptos,' meaning hidden or secret, joined to 'graphein,' to write — literally 'hidden writing.' The 'krypto-' root is the same one lurking in 'crypt' (a hidden chamber) and 'apocrypha' (writings of hidden authorship). The English word itself is a fairly modern assembly, coined when scholars wanted a tidy name for the old practice of disguising what one writes.
- Caesar's cipher
- Julius Caesar shifted letters by three to hide orders
- Enigma break
- Cracking it likely shortened WWII by years
- Public keys
- You can lock a box only the receiver opens
- Quantum threat
- Future computers may shatter today's encryption overnight
- Prime power
- Internet security rests on factoring huge numbers slowly
enigma machine — nazi germany's rotor cipher device used in wwii, broken by alan turing at bletchley park in 1941
zimmermann telegram — 1917 encrypted german message intercepted and decrypted by british room 40, helped bring us into wwi
caesar cipher — ancient roman substitution cipher used by julius caesar around 100 bce