The History of Cryptography

Good day dear Hive community, first of all I hope that you are all well and that you had a day that was full of positive experiences! In this post, I would like to bring you closer to the history of an interesting topic and hope you can expand your knowledge.

You see here artworks that I have created with artificial intelligence and are supposed to bring cryptography closer and the word originally comes from Greek and is derived from the words crypto for secret and graphy for writing. Already thousands of years ago, hieroglyphic and other characters were used in egypt to communicate encrypted and you can say cryptography was used wherever it was communicated. Of great importance for cryptography is the use of mathematical methods as well as algorithms and a sub-area is cryptoanalysis, which deals with cracking encryption. In ancient Mesopotamia, strange signs appeared on clay with which they have communicated and the Spartans also used an innovative process known as scytale and in order to be able to create messages they wrapped a piece of paper or leather around the scytale and wrote the message on it and handled this to deliver it to the recipient. The advantage was that only those who also had a scytale with the same diameter could decrypt the message and this is also one of the oldest military encryption methods and in ancient Greece some methods were already used to be able to communicate encrypted and one of them was designed by the writer Polybios and was also known as Polybius square.

An important person in the history of cryptography is Gaius Julius Caesar, who uses a symmetrical encryption method, also called Caesar cipher, and is based on the fact that he moved the letters in the alphabet and in this way it was quick and easy to encrypt or decrypt messages. In the early Middle Ages there was a big gap when it comes to cryptography and in the past this topic was often referred to as black magic and much of the knowledge was unfortunately lost and in the 15th century, the topic became more popular again. The old alchemists were also known for having communicated in encrypted form in a variety of ways and to transmit messages and in the 15th century, an encryption disk was invented in Italy that simplified encryption. At that time, Europe was one of the pioneers when it came to the topic and polyalphabetical, substitution or other methods were used and in parallel, thousands of other methods were developed all over the world and art was also an interesting method to be able to transmit messages in encrypted form. During the First World War, polybius square were used for encryption and at the end of the first world war, the well-known encryption machine Enigma was invented and in World War II Enigma was mainly used for encryption. In the cold war, so-called one-time pads were often used, which were known for high security, and with the development of computers, cryptographic procedures were also increasingly modernized.

Thanks for taking the time to read through my post and I hope you like it and can learn something new about cryptography!