The History of Cryptography

According to the dictionary.com, the definition of Cryptography is the science or study of the techniques of secret writing, especially code and cipher systems, methods, and the like. Because the credibility of the information became important, people start to encrypt their message or information with their incredible ideas. One of the most famous ciphers is the Caesar cipher. According to the practicalcryptography.com, the Caesar cipher is one of the earliest known and simplest ciphers. It is a type of substitution cipher in which each letters in the plaintext is “shifted” a certain number of places down the alphabet. However by the time pass, people realized that it is too easy to decrypt it when we find the pattern. To be specific, by using Frequency of the alphabet, that shows which alphabet were used most frequently, it was easy to find how many plaintext has been shifted.

Another cipher is the polyalphabetic cipher. Because it was easy to break the Caesar cipher by using Frequency Fingerprint, they had to make a new cipher which equalized the frequency. Therefore, they use multiple substitution alphabet shift. According to learncryptography.com, the polyalphabetic cipher uses a text string as a key, which is then used for doing a number of shifts on the plaintext.

However, in order to make cipher stronger, the cipher should look perfectly random, so a hacker can’t break it. One example of this is the one-time pad. The one-time pad is an encryption technique that cannot be cracked if used correctly. This is because, plaintext is paired with a random secret key. And this is impossible to break down, because the shift will never fall into a repetitive pattern. Also because it is randomized, it will have a uniform frequency distribution. In fact, it is possible to use one time pad more one time, but if it is used more than one time, it will lose perfect secrecy which led to make a pattern to hack the code.

However, even though the cipher is complex and unbreakable, there is one way to crack the code: by using a brute force attack. Even though it has the simplest theory, it is one of the strongest. However, it is only possible by using super computer. The brute-force search or exhaustive search, also known as generate and test, is a very general problem-solving techniques that consists of systematically enumerating all possible candidates for the solution and checking whether each candidate satisfies the problem’s statement. But reason why it is only possible to use it with super computer is because it has to run over and over again until it finds the answer key. And even people use the brute force attack, the security code can be change easily with another algorithm, to prevent from hack.