Cryptography Essay

Decent Essays
For as long as humans have tried to send secret messages, cryptography has been around to make sure the messages stay secretive. Cryptography is defined as the art of writing and solving codes. There are two parts of this process, encryption, which is writing secret codes, and decryption, which is solving the codes. Cryptography is one of the most important things in computing and is vital to make sure things are safe and secure. Without cryptography, technology would be very different. Early ciphers were called classical ciphers. They used paper and writing utensils and sometimes mechanical things to aid in encryption and decryption. Early ciphers were mostly used for war secrets. They made it so if the enemy intercepted your message likely …show more content…
Most classical ciphers are easy to crack. Some of them can just be cracked using just a brute force attack. This is just trying every possible combination of ciphers to decrypt a message. Others can be broken this way, but it is much harder because there are more possible combinations so it will take longer. Cryptography has been around for a very long time. One of the first ciphers was the Caesar Cipher. This cipher has been around for thousands of years. It is named after Julius Caesar, the famous Roman emperor, who used it to communicate with his generals in Europe. The Caesar Cipher is a substitution cipher and worked by shifting the alphabet a certain amount of places. For example, in a Caesar Cipher with a shift of 1, an ‘A’ would be encrypted as …show more content…
The Navajo language is a very unique and a rarely used language. The language is very complex. The same words have different meanings based on the sound. It is so different from other languages in its language family that it is not possible to get useful information from it knowing another language in its language family. One of the most important things about the language is that it is an unwritten language, meaning that there is no documentation anywhere about it making it impossible to learn except from someone who speaks the language. Philip Johnston was the man who recommended using Navajo to encrypt messages. It is undecipherable to anyone that doesn’t know the language. Johnston grew up with the Navajo children and ended up learning the language. He realized how great the language could be for secret codes during the war. The Navajo code was undecipherable and was much faster and more efficient for transmitting messages. It took machines of the time around 30 minutes to get a simple message that was encrypted, but it only took the Navajo code talkers 20 seconds. After seeing how useful they could be, a Marine Corps General wanted to recruit 200 Navajo speakers to send and receive secret messages. The Navajo code was never cracked and it was a vital part of helping to win the war. Having a secret cipher that could not be decrypted by any machine because there was no documentation of the cipher helped

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