Evolution of Military Encryption

Evolution of Military Encryption

900 BCE

This is a timeline of Military Encryption Methods throughout history that were used to keep sensitive information secret from enemies and a prying public.

Scytale

800 BCE

This was used by the Spartans and was made by wrapping parchment around a cylinder, the recipient would than decode and read it by using a rod of the exact same dimensions. This made it easy for enemies to read messages as well.

Steganography

440 BCE

This was a method of hiding messages in plain sight. Some executions of this method would be shaving the head of the most trusted individual, "marking" the message onto their scalp, or hiding files within other files.

Caesar Shift Cipher

99

This Cipher System was likely created around the first century. It got its name from Julius Caesar, who used it to encrypt Military Messages. As most people were illiterate at the time, these codes remained secure for some time before being cracked around the 5th-9th century.

Polyalphebetic Cipher

1467

Until Leon Battista Alberti devised his polyalphabetic cipher in 1467 most ciphers could be solved using frequency analysis. His method uses various substitution sources for different parts of the message. This marked the biggest improvement in cryptology since ancient times, earning him the title of "Father of Western Cryptology". At least according to David Khan.

Bellaso Cipher

1467

The Vigenère cipher is now widely accepted to have been originally created by Giovan Battista Bellaso (an Italian Cryptologist). It was later misattributed to Blaise de Vigenère in the 19th Century, hence its current name. It encrypts text using a series of interwoven Caesar ciphers based on a keyword. It is, therefore, a form of polyalphabetic substitution.

Pigpen Cipher

1500

The Pigpen cipher, as known as masonic or freemason cipher, is a geometric simple substitution cipher. It uses symbols to encode the letters within a message. It is encoded and decoded by producing a grid or set of grids to produce the subsequent symbols.

The Playfair Cipher

1854

First developed by Charles Wheatstone in 1854, the Playfair Cipher was named after its promoter, Lord Playfair. This form of encryption uses pairs of letters rather than single letters in simpler substitution ciphers making it much harder to break.

German Enigma Code

1919

These codes were changed daily and were both complex and different. Once decoded, they would be transformed into readable German, they than had to be translated into the different languages of the Allied Nations. These were nearly impossible for the Allies to read until Alan Turing captured a working Enigma Decoder and Code Books.

Public Key Cryptography

1970

Public Key Cryptography was first conceived by James H. Ellis in 1970 whilst working as a cryptographer for the GCHQ - but he soon ran into problems trying to implement it. His work was improved upon in 1973 by Clifford Cocks who developed RSA encryption algorithm. Later adapted by Malcolm J. Williamson in 1974 this method of encryption was also used by the NSA and would remain a secret for 27 years until it was declassified in 1997.