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History of cryptography. Cryptography, the use of codes and ciphers to protect secrets, began thousands of years ago. [ 1] Until recent decades, it has been the story of what might be called classical cryptography — that is, of methods of encryption that use pen and paper, or perhaps simple mechanical aids.
In colloquial use, the term "code" is often used to mean any method of encryption or concealment of meaning. However, in cryptography, code has a more specific meaning: the replacement of a unit of plaintext (i.e., a meaningful word or phrase) with a code word (for example, "wallaby" replaces "attack at dawn"). A cypher, in contrast, is a ...
Code (cryptography) A portion of the "Zimmermann Telegram" as decrypted by British Naval Intelligence codebreakers. The word Arizona was not in the German codebook and had therefore to be split into phonetic syllables. Partially burnt pages from a World War II Soviet KGB two-part codebook. In cryptology, a code is a method used to encrypt a ...
In cryptography, a Caesar cipher, also known as Caesar's cipher, the shift cipher, Caesar's code, or Caesar shift, is one of the simplest and most widely known encryption techniques. It is a type of substitution cipher in which each letter in the plaintext is replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions down the alphabet .
Kerckhoffs viewed cryptography as a rival to, and a better alternative than, steganographic encoding, which was common in the nineteenth century for hiding the meaning of military messages. One problem with encoding schemes is that they rely on humanly-held secrets such as "dictionaries" which disclose for example, the secret meaning of words.
Cryptanalysis (from the Greek kryptós, "hidden", and analýein, "to analyze") refers to the process of analyzing information systems in order to understand hidden aspects of the systems. [ 1] Cryptanalysis is used to breach cryptographic security systems and gain access to the contents of encrypted messages, even if the cryptographic key is ...
In cryptography, a cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption —a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is encipherment. To encipher or encode is to convert information into cipher or code. In common parlance, "cipher" is synonymous with "code", as ...
In 1923, a US Navy officer acquired a stolen copy of the Secret Operating Code codebook used by the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War I.Photographs of the codebook were given to the cryptanalysts at the Research Desk and the processed code was kept in red-colored folders (to indicate its Top Secret classification).