What part of human history has confused some of the best minds in all of history, saved

or doomed the lives of millions, and is now used in anything with a screen? Cryptography.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, cryptography is defined as the enciphering and

deciphering of messages in secret code or cipher. It has been used since written language existed

and plays a massive part in every digital aspect of life. But how much do you really know about

cryptography? My guess is, not much, even if you think you know everything about it. So today,

I’m going to take you on a journey through cryptography by first uncovering the past of

cryptography, then de-coding the present uses of cryptography, and finally, exploring the future

of cryptography.

So, let’s start our journey by uncovering the past of cryptography. Cryptography has been

around for as long as there has been a push for humans to keep secrets. As early as ancient

Egyptian times, ciphers have been used to keep messages safe during times of war and peace.

According to trincoll.edu, ancient Egyptians would us a substation cipher, where each letter of a

text is replaced with another letter in a pattern, to encrypt hieroglyphic texts. The Greeks used a

slightly more advanced cipher to decode their message. They wrote their messages on a strip of

paper wrapped around a stick. When the strip was unwound, the message became utter nonsense.

Then the receiver simply had to rewind the strip around a stick of the same diameter to unveil the

message. The Romans, on the other hand, used a slightly less secure method of encryption. They

created something called the Caesar’s cipher. The simple code used two alphabets, lined up, with

the A of the second alphabet lined up with the D of the first. This would cause the message

“move on Gaul at eight” to become PRYH RQ JDXO DW HLJKW. Both forms of encryption

are still used today. After the fall of the Roman Empire, codes were mainly used to hide

information from European monarchs. Many castles and warring lords used codes to send
messages. According to the book Code Girls by Liza Mundy, “in medieval Europe, with its

shifting alliances and palace intrigues, coded letters were an accepted convention, and so were

quiet attempts to slice open diplomatic pouches and read. Monks used codes, as did

Charlemagne, the inquisitor of Malta, the Vatican, Islamic scholars, and clandestine lovers.”

Everyone who needed to keep a secret used some form of encryption to hide it. These “Black

Chambers” as they were called, existed for centuries, and their descendants are the modern-day

intelligence agencies of European nations, such as the European Union Intelligence and Situation

Centre. In the United States, codes were used in the American Civil War, but they were not used

widely afterwards. Everything changed in 1940, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and launched

America into World War II. Thousands of men were recruited to fight, but the lesser known

heroes were almost 11,000 women who joined the army and navy as professional code creators

and breakers. These women helped to pave the path for female acceptance in the workplace by

proving that code breaking, typically a man’s job, could be handled just as well, if not better, by

a woman. Mrs. Abby Driscol, for example, cracked the incredibly complex Japanese code

system years before the Pearl Harbor attack. According to Laurance Safford in the book Code

Girls  “her success  ‘was the most difficult cryptanalytic task ever performed up to that date.’”

The only reason their work did not prevent the attack was the partial changing of the Japanese

code system days before the attack, not giving them enough time to make a substantial dent in

the new code. Cryptography helped the United States win the war in the Pacific. 

Now that we’ve uncovered the past of cryptography, let’s decipher the current uses of

cryptography. Modern cryptography, while not used quite as much for espionage, is used in your

day to day life, whether you know it or not. The most known use of cryptography in the modern

day is simple codes that are created by kids for fun. Many of these are simple substitution
ciphers, however, occasionally they can be complex. A good example of fun codes is this cipher

I created. In this cipher, I use a combination of squiggles, straight lines, and dots to encrypt

sentences. Computers are a major product of cryptography. Binary, the language of 1 and 0 that a

computer uses to communicate information, is a type of monoalphabetic cipher. Each letter in the

alphabet is replaced with a set of numbers. The computer reads these numbers and interprets

them. This method of coding traces all the way back to England in the 1600s. According to

Joshua Holden in the book The Mathematics of Secrets, binary was first alluded to in 1605.

Francis Bacon alluded to it in his book Of The Proficience and Advancement of Learning,

Divine and Humane. He later used it in his text De Augmentis Scientarum. He used a system in

which a message was converted into a series of ones and zeros, then inserted into another

sentence. He used two different fonts, one representing the zeros, and one representing the ones,

to hide his message. This form of encoding evolved over time to become the binary computer

code we use today. So, every time you pull up snapchat on your phone or pull up something on

YouTube, you can thank Francis Bacon for coming up with the idea for binary code.

Cryptography is also the basis of cybersecurity. According to cybersecurity.ieee.org,

cryptography is one of the most important tools for building secure systems. Cryptography has

three main uses in cyber security: ensuring data confidentiality, protecting data from attacks, and

authenticating data. The very definition of data confidentiality, according to sciencedirect.com,

ensures that confidential data is not disclosed to an unauthorized user. This is done through

optical encryption, which is a process that encodes data. It essentially uses a computer program

to apply a substitution cipher or binary cipher. Data protection processes are very similar to those

of data confidentiality. Complex codes and ciphers are used to keep hackers and cyber enemies

from accessing secret information. The key to this process is to confuse the enemy so much that
they give up. Simplecable.com defines data authentication as a process of confirming the origin

and integrity of data. Authentication is a multi-step process involving two people, the sender and

the receiver. The process starts when the sender sends an authorization code to the receiver. The

receiver gets the code and sends back a message with that code. The receiver is then considered

authenticated. All in all, cryptography is all around us, and we really don’t realize it as much as

we should.

Now that we’ve decoded some modern cryptography, let’s explore the future of cryptography.

The future is sure to bring advancements in security beyond anything we could think of. At the

forefront of the future is quantum cryptography. Quantum cryptography uses quantum computers

to perform cryptographic tasks. According to qeprize.org, quantum computers use quantum bits,

called qubits, to encode data. Qubits are especially useful because they can hold a value of both

one and zero simultaneously. This makes decryption without the proper key nearly impossible.

They can also compute and transmit data incredibly fast, leaving most forms of known

cryptography vulnerable to quantum computers. Small scale quantum computers already exist,

but they have yet to be used on a large scale. When they are eventually used on a large scale,

their impact will be massive around the world. With the rise of quantum cryptography, another

branch of cryptography has arisen. This is called post quantum cryptography. Post quantum

cryptography is dedicated to developing systems that are theoretically unbreakable by quantum

computers. One form of this cryptography is called super singular isogeny graphs. These graphs

rely on drawing lines between two points to solve problems. When there are enough points and

enough connections, the graph becomes too confusing for the computer to decipher. A complex

mathematical equation is used to determine each point and each connection. According to an

article in Science Magazine published in 2008, you can convert bits of data into directions using
numbers. Using those numbers as directions, you can find the right path through the maze. By

simply transmitting the directions through a different source, the maze would become

unbreakable. Another piece of the future of cryptography is homomorphic encryption. This is a

simple form of encoding. First, the message is transformed into numbers. These numbers are

then multiplied by a known factor. The result is a set of numbers that would return gibberish if

decoded without the multiplier. According to searchsecurity.techtarget.com, homomorphic

encryption is expected to play a large part in cloud computing in the future, allowing companies

to store information in a public cloud without risk of decryption.

First, we uncovered the past of cryptography, then we decoded the present uses of

cryptography, and finally, we looked at the future of cryptography. Cryptography has been a

constant and steady companion of humanity. Thanks to our desire to keep secrets hidden, we

have developed new ways to hide our information, and we will continue to use it to keep

ourselves and our secrets hidden from the public eye. I personally am excited to see what the

future brings to the field of cryptography. However, with these new codes and ciphers coming to

life, one major question remains; Can you crack the code?