Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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.
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 ...
World War II cryptography. Cryptography was used extensively during World War II because of the importance of radio communication and the ease of radio interception. The nations involved fielded a plethora of code and cipher systems, many of the latter using rotor machines. As a result, the theoretical and practical aspects of cryptanalysis, or ...
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 .
World War I cryptography. With the rise of easily-intercepted wireless telegraphy, codes and ciphers were used extensively in World War I. The decoding by British Naval intelligence of the Zimmermann telegram helped bring the United States into the war. Trench codes were used by field armies of most of the combatants (Americans, British, French ...
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.
Ciphertext is also known as encrypted or encoded information because it contains a form of the original plaintext that is unreadable by a human or computer without the proper cipher to decrypt it. This process prevents the loss of sensitive information via hacking. Decryption, the inverse of encryption, is the process of turning ciphertext into ...
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).