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Thomas Jefferson invents the Jefferson disk cipher
Also known as the Bazeries Cylinder, is a cipher system using a set of wheels or disks, each with the 26 letters of the alphabet arranged around their edge. The order of the letters is different for each disk and is usually scrambled in some random way. -
George Scovell's work on Napoleonic ciphers during the Peninsular War
Played a crucial role in breaking the codes of the French forces during that war, their Grande Chiffre. -
Joseph Henry proposes and builds an electric telegraph
Telegraph is the long-distance transmission of textual or symbolic (as opposed to verbal or audio) messages without the physical exchange of an object bearing the message. -
Samuel Morse develops the Morse code
Morse code is a method of transmitting text information as a series of on-off tones, lights, or clicks that can be directly understood by a skilled listener or observer without special equipment. It is named for Samuel F. B. Morse, an inventor of the telegraph. -
Charles Wheatstone invents Playfair cipher
Playfair cipher is a manual symmetric encryption technique and was the first literal digram substitution cipher. The scheme was invented in 1854 by Charles Wheatstone, -
The disk cipher, reinve by Etienne Bazeries
He is best known for developing the "Bazeries Cylinder", an improved version of Thomas Jefferson's cipher cylinder. -
Gilbert Vernam develops first practical implementation of a teletype cipher, now known as a stream cipher
A stream cipher is a symmetric key cipher where plaintext digits are combined with a pseudorandom cipher digit stream (keystream). In a stream cipher, each plaintext digit is encrypted one at a time with the corresponding digit of the keystream, to give a digit of the ciphertext stream -
Break of Japan's PURPLE machine cipher.
Codenamed Purple by the United States, was a diplomatic cryptographic machine used by the Japanese Foreign Office just before and during World War II. The machine was an electromechanical stepping-switch device. -
U.S. National Security Agency was founded
The National Security Agency (NSA) is an intelligence organization of the United States federal government responsible for global monitoring, collection, and processing of information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, a discipline known as signals intelligence (SIGINT). -
First production order for KW-26 electronic encryption system.
Was an encryption system used by the U.S. Government and, later, by NATO countries, developed by the NSA to secure fixed teleprinter circuits that operated 24 hours a day. -
David Kahn's The Codebreakers is published.
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John Anthony Walker walks into the Soviet Union's embassy
Sells information on KL-7 cipher machine. The Walker spy ring operates until 1985. -
RSA public key encryption invented.
RSA is one of the first practical public-key cryptosystems and is widely used for secure data transmission. -
Phil Zimmermann releases the public key encryption program
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Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption protocol released by Netscape.
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Belgian Rijndael algorithm selected as the U.S. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)
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Edward Snowden discloses a vast trove of classified documents from NSA