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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.
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 scheme for changing or substituting an element below such a level (a letter, a syllable, or a pair of letters, etc ...
The pigpen cipher uses graphical symbols assigned according to a key similar to the above diagram. [1]The pigpen cipher (alternatively referred to as the masonic cipher, Freemason's cipher, Rosicrucian cipher, Napoleon cipher, and tic-tac-toe cipher) [2] [3] is a geometric simple substitution cipher, which exchanges letters for symbols which are fragments of a grid.
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 ...
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.
Applications of cryptography include ATM cards, computer passwords, and electronic commerce. Cryptography prior to the modern age was effectively synonymous with encryption, the conversion of information from a readable state to apparent nonsense. The originator of an encrypted message shared the decoding technique needed to recover the ...
Symmetric-key algorithms[ a] are algorithms for cryptography that use the same cryptographic keys for both the encryption of plaintext and the decryption of ciphertext. The keys may be identical, or there may be a simple transformation to go between the two keys. [ 1] The keys, in practice, represent a shared secret between two or more parties ...
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 ...