Cryptography
...on eBay or watching satellite television. I bet you even used cryptology when you were in school and did not even know it. Ever write a message in numbers instead of letters? Each letter of the alphabet correlated to its number position in the alphabet. The number sequence 3,16,25,12,20,15,12,15,7,25 equals cryptology. This is a form of cryptology in its most basic form. Webster's dictionary defines Cryptography as :
n. 1. The act or art of writing in code or secret characters; also, secret characters, codes or ciphers, or messages written in a secret code.
2. The science which studies methods for encoding messages so that they can be read only by a person who knows the secret information required for decoding, called the key; it includes cryptanalysis, the science of decoding encrypted messages without possessing the proper key, and has several other branches; see for example steganography. [1]
Cryptographies main purpose is to hide messages and information. One of the earliest forms of cryptography was the rearranging of letters in messages. This was known as transportation ciphers. A cipher is a system in which plain text, usually the letters, are transposed or substituted according to a predetermined code. Another early form of cryptography was the substitution of letters. One cipher was named after Julius Caesar who was said to have used a 3 letter shift. This involved substituting a letter with another letter in the alphabet three positions away. Caesar used this method to communicate with his generals in wartimes. [2]
Cryptography tries to protect the confidential nature in the communications of military leaders and diplomats. Cryptography was used by early Christians to hide some parts of their writings. One example, 666, the Number of the Beast from the New Testament Book of Revelation, was thought to refer to the Roman Emperor Nero. One of...
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