- History - Interesting places along the cryptography timeline.
- About 1900 BC: an Egyptian scribe used non-standard
hieroglyphs in an inscription.
- 50-60 BC: Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) used a simple
substitution with the normal alphabet (just shifting the
letters a fixed amount) in government communciations. This
cipher was less strong than a reversed alphabet substitute cipher
system, by a small amount, but in a day when few people read in the
first place, it was good enough. He also used transliteration of
Latin into Greek letters and a number of other simple ciphers.
- 1518 AD: Johannes Trithemius wrote the first printed book
on cryptology. He invented a steganographic cipher in which
each letter was represented as a word taken from a succession
of columns. The resulting series of words would be a legitimate
prayer. He also described polyalphabetic ciphers in the now-standard
form of rectangular substitution tables. He introduced the notion of
changing alphabets with each letter.
- 1918 AD: The ADFGVX system was put into service by the
Germans near the end of WW-I. This was a cipher which performed
a substitution (through a keyed array), fractionation and then
transposition of the letter fractions. It was broken by the French
cryptanalyst, Lieutenant Georges Painvin.
- 1933-45 AD: The Enigma machine was not a commercial success
but it was taken over and improved upon to become the
cryptographic workhorse of Nazi Germany. [It was broken by the
Polish mathematician, Marian Rejewski, based only on captured
ciphertext and one list of three months worth of daily keys obtained
through a spy. Continued breaks were based on developments during
the war by Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman and others at
Bletchley Park in England.]
- Enigma was mainly used in the U-Boats and it was
the job of Turing and other mathematicians of the time
to break the communication cipher code to prevent
further losses in Allied shipping.
Copyright 1997 by Slackers Union. Comments should go to any of the
group members. Opinions reflected on this page are by no means
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Last Modified: June 1, 1997
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