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1900 BCE
Egypt
The very first documented form of Cryptography was from an Egyptian Scribe using non standard hieroglyphics in a royal tomb. -
60 BCE
Ceaser Cipher
Julius Caesar used a simple substitution with the normal alphabet (just shifting the letters a fixed amount) in government communications. -
Jan 1, 1466
Alberti Cipher
Leon Battista Alberti invented and published the first polyalphabetic cipher, designing a cipher disk to simplify the process. The multiple alphabets are just rotations of the existing the existing alphabet. -
Grille
Cardinal Richelieu utilized a method of sending secret messages. The method centered around having a card with specifically located holes that when held to a document would mask all unneeded letters leaving only the message. -
Hidden
Sir Francis Bacon implemented one of the first uses of stenography, which is the art of hiding a secret message inside an image or within the letters of a message. -
Jefferson Wheel
Thomas Jefferson came up with a cipher system very similar to the Vigenere Cipher
except with higher security. His invention was 26 wheels with the alphabet randomly scattered on each
wheel. The wheels were numbered and ordered with a specified order. This order is the key to the
encryption algorithm. -
Paris
Used by Napoleon and his army, consisting of over 200 code numbers and based on the ciphers of Louis XIV. The cipher however was broken by Major George Scovell in 1812. -
The Invention of the Telegraph
Communication with the telegraph was by no means secure, so ciphers were needed to transmit secret
information -
Radio
Now that transmissions were open for anyone's inspection, and physical security was no longer possible. The French
had many radio stations by WW1 and intercepted most German radio transmissions. -
One Time
Joseph Mauborgne developed an encryption system known as a one-time pad. Similar to encrypting a message using a secret key, but in the case of a one-time pad the secret key is a random sequence of numbers as long as the original message, and it is used only once. -
Roto Cipher Machine
Hugo Alexander Koch filed a patent in the Netherlands on a rotor based cipher machine. -
VIC Cipher
The VIC cipher, used by Soviet spy Reino Häyhänen, was known at the time as the most complex pen-and-paper cipher. Häyhänen famously used the VIC cipher on a rolled up piece of paper hidden inside a hollowed out US nickel to relay messages to other Russian spies within the US. -
Data Encryption Standard
Adopted as a standard by the US government. The standard implementation of DES operates on 64-bit blocks (that is, it uses an alphabet of length 264-- each ``character'' is 8 bytes long), and uses a 56-bit key. -
National Navajo Code Talkers Day
Ronald Reagan recognized the Navajo code talkers on this day. During WWII the Navajo nation created a coded language with their complex dialect that assisted in the victory of the war. -
Advance Encryption Standard
Advanced Encryption Standards was a new method of cryptography that utilizes an encryption algorithm created by two Cryptographers, Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen.The algorithm described by AES is a symmetric-key algorithm, meaning the same key is used for both encrypting and decrypting the data