Cryptography

By Velendron
  • 1900 BCE

    First use of Cryptography

    Egyptians are credited with the first use of cryptography. while the text was not changed to hide the true text, it was used to make the writing look more elegant.
  • 100 BCE

    The Caesar Cipher

    The use of cryptography changed very before now. Julius Caesar used a well known and popular simple ciphers. This was called the substitution cipher. This cipher was used many times to convey secret messages. this is considered very simple to break.
  • 801

    Frequency Analysis

    The technique of using frequency analysis is developed and is used to break many mono alphabetic ciphers of the time. this includes the one that Julius Caesar used. this technique is still used today in most handwritten ciphers. this technique states that every language has a higher frequency of certain letters and using this, one can break many different ciphers.
  • 1466

    First Mechanical Cipher machine

    Leon Battista Alberti invents what is known as the poly alphabetic cipher and is also credited as being the first to develop the first mechanical cipher machine.

  • Vigenere Cipher

    The Vigenere cipher was the first that used the idea of having a encryption key that was used to encode and decode the message. this key was based on the remainder of dividing two numbers. this cipher is also considered easy to decode.

  • The Jefferson Disc

    The Jefferson disk cipher is a spindle of wheels with the letters of the alphabet on each wheel. Each wheel has a number associated with it and the order of the wheels on the spindle is the cipher key. this cipher was used by the US army from 1923 to 1942 known as the M-94

  • Playfair Cipher

    Lord Playfair promotes the use of the cipher made by Charles Wheatstone. This cipher uses substitution of pairs of letters in a diagram and is then significantly harder to break. The frequency analysis technique will not be able to break this cipher.

  • Failed beginings

    The start of WW1 was a rough start for the Americans and their use of codes and ciphers. the front lines had developed a set of codes, called Trench Codes, that never saw any use in the war as they were tested and broken in less than a day time, rendering them unusable.

  • River Code Series

    The series of River codes was a successful series of Trench codes that was introduced during the first world war and was changed out every 10 to 14 days to make it harder for the enemy to figure out the code.

  • Hebern Rotor and the beginnings of the Enigma

    In the aftermath of WW1, Edward Hebern developed a design and built a rotor machine that would automatically encrypt a message using rotors and electronics. This would be a major development into the German Enigma machine that would be used in WW2.
  • Period: to

    The Enigma Machine

    The Enigma machine was used in WW2 to encode messages for the German army. This machine used the idea of using rotors and electronics to make randomized cipher text. This code would eventually be broken by Polish code breakers, and the British would then go on to make a machine that could decode the cipher text easily each day, when the code would change. this code was known to be a modern use of Cryptography as it is used in a much larger scale today.

  • Modern development of encryption

    IBM starts research and development in providing encryption for their services and clients. They develop a group that is dedicated to developing a standard encoding process for their services. their attempts would then give birth to the encryption process called Lucifer.

  • The new standard

    In 1973, IBM develops what will become the first standard encryption method that will be used for all computer systems. This standard would be the norm up until the processing power of computers would become high enough to be able to use brute force to find the small encryption key.

  • The New, New standard

    Lucifer would live until processing power would prove it obsolete. In 1997, a new standard was being developed that would take Lucifer's place. This would be be a process of having different companies and other independents developing a new process that could be an improvement on the previous standard.

  • AES

    In 2000, The new code that was being developed to replace Lucifer was found. Originally called Rijndael, This code block was then renamed The Advanced Encryption Standard. Also known as AES