CRYPTOGRAPHY THROUGH THE AGES 1

Cryptography Through the Ages

Justin M. Downes

Brooklyn College
CRYPTOGRAPHY THROUGH THE AGES 2

Abstract

Throughout History, Cryptography has been used as a means to keep valuable

information secure even if it fell into the wrong hands. The use of cryptography has with each
century has become more and more important since of the advances of technology and the
shrewdness of the enemy. This paper divides the history of cryptography into 3 parts Ancient, or
anything before the establishment of the Roman Church in 538 AD, Middle
Ages/Renaissance/Scientific Revolution period which is from 538 AD to 1850 and Modern
Cryptography is defined in this essay as anything from the 1850s on.
Keywords: Cryptography, history
CRYPTOGRAPHY THROUGH THE AGES 3

What Is Cryptography

According to the Webster's online dictionary, Cryptography is the enciphering

and deciphering of messages in secret code or Cipher; also: the computerized encoding
and decoding of information. The two main processes of cryptography are the method
or how you encrypt the data, and the second process is the key generation. An example
would be comparing the General process of encryption to a Lock and the Keygen (key
generator) is the combination needed to crack the lock.

Ancient History

We do not officially know the first time that man tried to encrypt data and their
reasons but we do know about the first time where large scale ciphers were used. This
was in Sparta Greece in the 5th century B. C. The Spartans used a Scytale Cipher
which was a wooden staff in which a strip of leather or parchment was covering. The
method of recovery for the Cipher was to put the strip of parchment around a scytale
with the same dimensions at which it was created. This is known as a transposition
cipher which changes the order of the characters and not the characters themselves
which is a substitution cipher. The next early form of cryptography is found in ancient
Rome with the Caesar Cipher. This was a form of a substitution cipher where each letter
had a substitute letter value which would be used to encrypt the text. You had to know
what each letter's value was in plaintext or regular text to decrypt the code. The effect
this had on the Romans was huge because intercepted messages by the enemy could
no longer be decoded so plans were secure and safe. In ancient times most people did
not know how to read so a decrypting team was limited and the enemy would most
likely would be non Roman so they would have to have knowledge of the language first
before they could get on with any decryption.
CRYPTOGRAPHY THROUGH THE AGES 4

Example 1: In this example of a Substitution Cipher we see that each letter in the
alphabet has a corresponding encryption letter like C-->E and to find out what a word
such as UKQN means you would have to have a the decoder in order to solve it.

Example 2: This is an example of a transpositional cipher which basically just

scrambles the letters in a specific order.

Medieval Cryptography

With the importation of the Indian number system to the middle east math began
to be featured more heavily in cryptography than before. The first person to start using
math in cryptography was Al-Kindi, an Arab Mathematician. In his system he used
frequency analysis of letters to crack encrypted messages. This method of frequency
analysis led to ciphers at that time being easily cracked. To increase security people
had to figure out more powerful ways to encrypt data instead of just using simple
transpositional and substitution ciphers. This was one of the greatest advances of
cryptography until World War 2. The next advancement in cryptography came from
Leon Battista Alberti, an Italian Renaissance man. Heralded as The Father of Modern
Cryptography he created a polyalphabetic cipher which was a type of substitution
cipher that used mixed alphabets to encrypt a message. This was the polyalphabetic
cipher in history and a well known polyalphabetic cipher was the Enigma Machine in
World War 2. This was achieved in 1466 and less than 100 years later Johannes
Trithemius in 1518 had his book trilogy Stenographia which means hidden writing in
Greek. His book had many interesting ways to encrypt a message such as to stretch
each letter of a secret message into a word. He would then assemble the words into
awkward prose, often in the form of pious sermons.(Byron Spice, 1998) His third book
in the trilogy was about how to contact planetary intelligences and nothing about
cryptography but 500 years later it was found out that the book was a encrypted text
itself. The code was broken by Thomas Ernst in 1993.

Another major invention in the history of cryptography in medieval times was the
creation of the Jefferson Cipher which was invented by Thomas Jefferson. It was
created using a set of disks, each with the 26 letters of the alphabet arranged around
CRYPTOGRAPHY THROUGH THE AGES 5

their edge. The order of the letters is different for each disk and is scrambled in some
random way.(Monticello) Each disk is marked with a unique number. There were 26
discs on a roll with each disk having a random letter combination where each letter was
used only once on each disk. 2 Identical ciphers would be created and the people who
the message was being shared with would agree on the order of the discs which would
be 26! Combinations which equals 4.0329146e+26 different combinations of wheels.
This cipher is extremely difficult to decode without a computer. It was used in the United
States Army from 1923-1942. The Germans broke the cipher in 1944 but it was too late
since the US moved on to stronger modes of encryption already.

Example 3: This is a model version of the Jefferson cipher.

Modern Cryptography

The 1900s were a time where more advances of cryptography were made than in
all of history. This has led to the creation of new cryptographic methods that
incorporated more and more math concepts in order to combat the fast breaking time
that the enemies of each country had due to more mathematicians pooling together to
break codes. By the end of the century unbreakable ciphers were created and most
ciphers were impossible to crack by hand and the highest grade ciphers were
CRYPTOGRAPHY THROUGH THE AGES 6

impossible to break by even the highest grade supercomputers without over hundreds
of billions of years in time.

Early 1900s
The early 1900s major advancement in cryptography came from William F.
Friedman who was an army cryptographer for the US. Around 1915 he became the first
person to apply statistics to cryptography. One of the main examples is this is
coincidence counting. This involves putting two pieces of text side by side and counting
the number of letters that are identical and appear in the same position in the text. You
then take this number and then divide it by the total number of letters in the text or
divide it by the expected value for the total to get the Index of Coincidence. This was a
major stepping stone in cryptography, mainly deciphering but also for encryption
because with this knowledge he invented many ciphers that were resistant to his own
attacks.

DES
The DES or Data encryption standard was the encryption standard for the United
States government from 1977 to 2001. It was eventually replaced by the AES
encryption standard. The DES standard is a block cipher which according to
searchsecurity.techtarget.com, meaning a cryptographic key and algorithm are applied
to a block of data simultaneously rather than one bit at a time. (Margaret Rouse)

Example 4: This picture shows how the data is encrypted through the DES algorithm.
There are about 2^64 combinations that are possible for this algorithm or
9,223,372,036,854,775,807.

According to searchsecurity.techtarget.com in 1998, a computer built by the

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) decrypted a DES-encoded message in 56 hours.
By harnessing the power of thousands of networked computers, the following year EFF
cut the decryption time to 22 hours.(Margaret Rouse) This was the end of the road for
DES and this showed that the algorithm was no longer secure enough for government
protection.
CRYPTOGRAPHY THROUGH THE AGES 7

AES
AES or advanced encryption systems in the most secure encryption standard on
the planet. It was adopted by the United States government in 2001 and comes in 128,
192 and 256 bit encryption blocks. This encryption standard was created by Vincent
Rimjeen and Joan Daemen. This was an encryption system that was faster than DES
and more secure.(Margaret Rouse) It would take 5.4183479e52 years to crack the AES
code. How is this possible. Well Tianhe-2 Supercomputer is the worlds fastest computer
and it calculates 33.86 petaflops (quadrillion flops) =33 860 000 000 000 000 keys per
second (33.86 quadrilion). AES has in all 2^256 keys which is 1.1579209e+77 keys. If
we do the math we can see that

3.386e16 * 31556952 seconds in a year

2255 possible keys

2^255 / 1.0685184e24

=1.0685184e24 keys per year (~1 septillion, 1 yottaflop)

=5.4183479e52 years

That is 3.7367917e+42 times the amount of time the universe has been in existence.
As you can see AES is super secure and is not getting cracked any time soon.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we see that the history of cryptography is a long one with many
groundbreaking advances that came in the 1900s. Today there are many unbreakable crypto
methods that we can't break with today's computers and even with computers of the near
future. This ensures that data is kept safe from people who are unscrupulous and want to do
harm, whether its hackers, other nations or spies. Cryptography makes sure what we want to
say is kept safe from these prying eyes.
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