06/08/2020

1. Scytale Was A Simple Cipher Used By The Spartans

Its First Appearance: Ancient Greece – 7th Century BC

Where It Appeared: Classical/Ancient Greece/Sparta

When It Was Cracked (if applicable): Unknown – But known about by Plutarch (50-120AD)

Scytale was an ancient form of encryption commonly in ancient/classical Greece. It is a form of transposition cipher where letters are re-arranged in the messages prior to being deciphered by the recipient. 

This method involved the use of a cylinder around which a parchment was wrapped and the message written onto it. The recipient would use a rod of the exact same dimensions to read the message.

Given its simplicity, it was easily decipherable by the enemy too. 

A scytale implements a permutation of the symbols of the message (also called a transposition). … In contrast to scytale, other ancient cryptographic mechanisms used an encryption method which did not separate key from mechanism. So if anyone knows the process she can also decrypt the message.

It was used by the Greeks within their military operations, and where they would create a cylinder of a given radius, and wrap a ribbon around it. Then, only the person with a cylinder of the right radius would be able to read the ciphered message. While it might not seem secure in our modern world, this secret message, at the time, was fairly secure (until the enemy knew the secret behind the cipher, of course).

418 × 175

2. The Choctaw code talkers (first world war)

When the US Army’s 36th division was fighting on the Western Front in France in the First World War, it had to rely on the telephone to transmit messages. However, the Army was convinced that the messages were being eavesdropped by the Germans.

Within the division, there was a company of Choctaw Native Americans who spoke twenty-six different dialects, most of which were never written down. They were asked to translate and communicate the regiment’s messages and the Germans suddenly found they were unable to comprehend anything of what was being said.

One interesting feature of the system was that the Choctaw dialect did not include all the necessary military terms required to transmit messages. They used the term “big gun” for artillery and “little gun shoot fast” for machine gun.

Choctaw men were over-heard speaking their Native language in the midst of battlefields in France and an officer immediately had a brainstorm. Training the Choctaws to use their words as “code,” they were placed strategically on front lines and at command posts so that messages could be transmitted without being understood by the enemy. Nineteen Choctaw men have been documented as being the first to use their own language as a “code” to transmit military messages. During the first world war, with the tapping of the American Army’s phone lines, the Germans were able to learn the location of where the Allied Forces were stationed, as well as where supplies were kept. When the Choctaw men were put on the phones and talked in their Native speech, the Germans couldn’t effectively spy on the transmissions. 

Code Talkers | Choctaw Nationwww.choctawnation.com › history-culture › people › c…

World War One: The original code talkers – BBC Newswww.bbc.com › news › magazine-26963624

3. Cat meme code (ideky i included this but ok)

That cute cat meme may not be quite what it seems – it could be hiding a secret message.

Steganography, or hiding messages, has been around since ancient times but some people are now bringing it right up to date by hiding messages in the colour information of digital images.

The image system known as 24-bit RGB can be used to distinguish between millions of different shades and the red, green and blue contributions to each pixel are represented by eight binary digits. The contributions range from no colour (00000000) to full colour (11111111).

The difference in shades represented by, say, 11111110 and 11111111 is imperceptible to the human eye. Knowing this we can use the rightmost digit to hide information. One pixel gives us three binary digits (red, green and blue) to play with and a web image measuring 5cm square contains more than 20,000 pixels so you can easily hide a text message or even a completely different picture, as long as the recipient knows how to extract the information. (DONT REALLY THINK THIS MAKES SENSE BUT OK)

4. Quantum cryptography (around 1968)

Using quantum mechanics could prove to be the ultimate cryptographic method. One scheme uses the polarisation of photons to hide information.

Light can be polarised in one of two ways: one in which vibration is horizontal or vertical (called rectilinear) and another in which vibration is diagonal.  We can use these polarisations to represent the binary digits 0 and 1. For example, in horizontal polarization (-) might represent a 0, making vertical polarization (|) represent 1. Or left-handed diagonal polarization (\) might be 0 and right-handed (/), 1.

To make this work for messaging, both sender and recipient need to know which polarisation scheme has been used, rectilinear or diagonal. Only by using the correct type of detector will you get the correct binary digit out.

In general, the goal of quantum cryptography is to perform tasks that are impossible or intractable with conventional cryptography. Quantum cryptography makes use of the subtle properties of quantum mechanics such as the quantum no-cloning theorem and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle

Quantum cryptography was first proposed by Stephen Wiesner, then at Columbia University in New York, who, in 1968 or later, introduced the concept of quantum money and quantum conjugate coding.

esearchers have recently demonstrated that even quantum encryption may be susceptible to hacking.

5. The Enigma Code (Significantly Shortened World War 2)

Its First Appearance: 1918-1920

Where It Appeared: Germany/Nazi Germany

When It Was Cracked (if applicable): It varies depending on the source – between 1941 and 1945

The term ‘Enigma Code’ is generally understood as the cipher device used by German forces during WW2 to encrypt their transmissions.

Enigma machines were invented by the Germans towards the end of the First World War and were then adopted by various militaries around the world. 

During the Second World War, different military services developed their own encryption keys that would often be changed daily. As the allies cracked the codes the Axis forces would be forced to change them – only to have them cracked again.

A primary example of this ‘code arms race’ was the different phases of the success of German U-Boat ‘Wolf Packs’ during the Battle for the Atlantic.

The brunt of the deciphering work was conducted by Polish code breakers and famously, Alun Turing and his team at Bletchley Park with his Bombe Enigma cracking machine.

The Enigma Machine Explained

6.  The Vigenère Cipher/The Bellaso Cipher (a little confusion in this)

first site says

Its First Appearance: 1467

Where It Appeared: Italy

When It Was Cracked (if applicable): Decryption technique published in 1863

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.

Vigenere Cipher is a method of encrypting alphabetic text. It uses a simple form of polyalphabetic substitution. A polyalphabetic cipher is any cipher based on substitution, using multiple substitution alphabets .The encryption of the original text is done using the Vigenère square or Vigenère table.

• The table consists of the alphabets written out 26 times in different rows, each alphabet shifted cyclically to the left compared to the previous alphabet, corresponding to the 26 possible Caesar Ciphers.
• At different points in the encryption process, the cipher uses a different alphabet from one of the rows.
• The alphabet used at each point depends on a repeating keyword.

second site says this 

Bellaso cipher

In the 16th century, Italian cryptographer Giovan Battista Bellaso recognised the power of using multiple alphabets to encrypt messages. Bellaso’s method uses ten alphabets as shown in the image below:

To use the cipher, you use a keyword previously agreed between the sender and recipient.

We write this keyword out as many times as needed above our message as below (we have used ROMVLVS). To encipher each letter, we look at the alphabet labelled with each letter of the keyword in Bellaso’s chart above and then write down the letter that sits above or below that character from the message to get the encrypted letter.

The coded message was then QMUNMTCPIIIALQSDAYM. Note that different letters in the original message can be encrypted as the same cipher letter – a good way to confuse anyone intercepting the message.

7. Advance Encryption Standard (AES) / Rinjdael

Its First Appearance: 1998-2001

Where It Appeared: United States of America

When It Was Cracked (if applicable): 2011

Rijndael encryption is based on byte-by-byte replacement, swap, and XOR.

At Rijndael, encryption is done with a 128, 192, or 256-bit key, which provides guaranteed increased security against brute-force attacks. In addition, this encryption method works three times faster than DES in software. 

The procedure looks like this:

• Rijndael again generates 10 128-bit keys from the 128-bit key.
• These are stored in 4 x 4 tables.
• The plaintext is also divided into 4 x 4 tables (each in 128-bit chunks).
• Each of the 128-bit plaintext pieces is processed in a 10-round process (10 rounds on 128-bit keys, 11 on 192, 13 on 256).
• Thus, the code is generated after the 10th round.
• Each individual byte is substituted in an S-box and replaced by the reciprocal over GF (2 8).
• Subsequently, a modulo 2 matrix is applied bitwise and an XOR operation is performed at 63.
• The rows of the matrices are now sorted cyclically.
• Then the columns are exchanged by matrix multiplication via a Galois field (GF) (2 8).
• An XOR link is applied to the subkey for each round.

The security of this encryption method increases when Rijndael is performed several times with different round keys.

AES Rijndael Cipher explained as a Flash animation

8. The SOE code

During the Second World War, Britain’s Special Operations Executive communicated with agents behind enemy lines using codes based on poems.

The first step is to choose five words from a poem such as Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate” and write them out in the top row of a grid.

We then work our way through the alphabet, starting at a and find the first occurrence in the grid, numbering it 1. The second a is numbered 2, the third 3. We then move to the letter b and do the same. If no b is found, we just move on to c and continue numbering like this until every letter has a number. You then write out your message letter by letter in the columns underneath. If the message is too short to fill the columns, fill it with xs.

Look at the numbers again and write down all the letters in the column below the number 1, followed by 2 and so on to give the coded message LEI STS IAO TAM IOD BSN ERE LRD CII and so on. You need the original poem words to be able to break this code easily.

The poem code is a simple, and insecure, cryptographic method which was used by SOE to communicate with their agents in Nazi-occupied Europe. The method works by the sender and receiver pre-arranging a poem to use.

9. The Voynich manuscript (15th Century)

In 1912, Polish-born antiquarian bookseller Wilfrid Michael Voynich bought 30 books from a Jesuit college in Italy including a vellum codex dating from the 1400s that has since become known as the Voynich Manuscript.

The 240 pages of the manuscript are covered with 170,000 unusual symbols and glyphs. On virtually every page, there are illustrations of botanical specimens and astronomical drawings while the more unusual ones show “miniature female nudes, most with swelled abdomens”.

Top US codebreaker William Friedman tried to crack the code but failed.  In 2014, Professor Stephen Bax of the University of Bedfordshire made the first steps in solving the mystery by analysing medieval herbal texts and working out the possible meaning of a number of words and symbols.

illustrated manuscript written in an unknown language and thought to have been created in the 15th or 16th century. It is named after antiquarian bookseller Wilfrid Voynich, who purchased it in 1912. Scholars and scientists have sought to decipher the text since the manuscript was first discovered. It lies In a vault in the basement of a library in Connecticut

it may have been composed in Italy during the Italian Renaissance.

The world’s most mysterious book – Stephen Bax

10. The Ave Maria code

German abbot Johannes Trithemius was the author of the first printed book on cryptography but many thought his secret writings meant he was dabbling with the devil and he was forced to resign his post.

One of his codes is known as the Ave Maria cipher. His book Polygraphia consists of 384 columns of letters of the alphabet, each with a corresponding code word as shown in the examples above.

Say you wish to encrypt the word ‘monk’. Using the tables above, you write down the corresponding word for each letter from consecutive columns. The coded message for monk would therefore read Rector gloriosus mansionem immortalem.

The recipient carries out the same thing in reverse to reveal the word. Anyone intercepting the message – a long list of Latin words – would think it was merely a prayer, meaning it is unlikely to attract suspicion.

Encryption consists in encoding each letter of the message with a word in the list, the result will resemble a prayer/litany in Latin. The Latin alphabet does not have all the letters, there is no V replaced by U, there is no J, replaced by I, and so on. The Letter is replaced by the Previous letter.