Protocol Foundations 001: Cryptography
<p>Throughout history, humans have used <em>cryptography</em> to protect sensitive messages from eavesdropping. Famously, to avoid trusting messengers, Julius Caesar would encode messages he sent to generals at war. He specifically replaced each letter in his original message by one that was a fixed distance away from it in the alphabet. For example, the word <em>attack</em> could be modified to <em>dwwdfn</em> by using a distance of 3: <em>d</em> is three letters past <em>a</em>, <em>w</em> is three from <em>t</em>, and so on. This technique is called a <strong>Caesar cipher</strong>. As long as Caesar communicated the offset to a general in advance, he could send seemingly illegible messages to them which they could then decipher…</p>
Authors: Mario Havel, Tim Beiko
Part of: Summer of Protocols
ISBN: 9781962872539