History of encryption

 

Contrary to what most people think, file encryption is not a new thing. Encryption has been around for long time and it's been used by kings, governments and armies. Today it's been mostly used by individuals and business. One early example of encryption is a Caesar Cypher, developed by none other than Julius Caesar. It was a simple substitution cypher, basically it involved just switching letter of an alphabet. The other good example is the Scytale - a stick that you would wrap your message around and use it to encrypt a message. Encryption was also used during the american revolution by british and american troops with the purpose to get the information about troops, their movements, supplies and similar.

Picture 1. Caesar Cypher
You can see how one letter can become another letter by replacing it and moving it down a couple of positions.

Picture 2 Enigma Machine
Enigma machine was used in WW2 and developed by Germans, it was considered unbreakable but NSA latter captured them and broke the codes.

In today's modern times we need the encryption to protect data over networks and computers revived and refined file encryption processes, methods, and technologies. We no longer use the old methods such as Scytale, rearranging the letters of alphabet is the matter of past, modern methods use mathematical formulas (algorithms) and complex keys (variables) to transform or scramble the 1's and 0's (bits) that make up data. Such advanced methods are very complex, they must assure that the encrypted files is not "breakable" by not only humans but power computers.

 

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