--Originally published at Don't Trust Humans, Trust Computers
In 2014, a movie called “The Imitation Game” was released. This movie is about Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computer science. He build a machine capable of figuring out the secret message the Germans where transmitting to each other, back in the WWII era. The messages the germans where sending and receiving, where encrypted messages that only they know how to decrypted them. Turing was clever enough to build a machine that could decrypt those message, and thanks to that the Allies gained a great advantage against the Axis. Of course, it took a lot of Turing’s patience and time, to be able to build this machine. I bring this movie, because in it is about cryptography.
For those who doesn’t know what cryptography is, well, is the process of securing information from other people. In other words, is about making text unreadable to persons for who’s the message doesn’t concern at all. Like for example, let’s say you want to send a message in class to your friend, but you don’t want anybody but your friend to understand the message. So you and your friend plan to have a secret code so the text you and him write could only be decipher by you.
In cryptography, there are two main processes, the first one is encryption and the second one is decryption. Encryption is all about making a normal plain text into something unreadable, just converting a text into random letters. And decryption is the other way around, is the process of converting the unreadable text into an understandable text again.
There exists many algorithms that will do encryption and decryption, some of them are pretty simple, while other are more complex. To these algorithms we called them ciphers. Some of the most famous ciphers are:
- ROT13 Cipher.
- Cipher.
- Vigenere Cipher.
- Four-Square Cipher.
- Hill Cipher.
We need to come clean and say that all ciphers can be break, it depends in the complexity of the cipher if it will be easy break, or if it will take a lot of time. Nowadays cryptography is all over the internet, from the moment you buy something online, or even when you login to a web application. Cryptography is a very important part in many areas in the computer science field. We can find encrypted keys in the network field, encrypted files in some OS, and has I had mentioned, also in the Internet. Cryptography as always been a part of human history, but now is more common than we know.
Stay safe.
A.C.
Reference http://practicalcryptography.com/
