The Roots Of Cryptography

Cryptography claims its roots from the latin root of kryptos, which means hidden secret, and graphein, which means writing. According to Dictionary.com, "Cryptography is the science or study of techniques of secret writing and message hiding." In today 's fast paced and tech savvy world, it isn 't strange to have at least a fleeting knowledge of cryptology and encryption specifically but this relatively young science and field of engineering has very deep roots. The generally agreed upon first example of cryptography at work occurred nearly four thousand years ago and is found in the ancient tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Khnumhotep, where "...[the scribe] uses some unusual hieroglyphic symbols here and there in place of more ordinary …show more content…
The Spartans were an adept warrior society, basing the entirety of their fame on military might, and like every modern military, they had a means of encrypted communication. The Spartans used a technique called a Transposition Cypher. This cypher works by rearranging letters rather than outright replacing them. How they did it was by creating a cylindrical device called a Scytale of which is "the first mechanical enciphering device" (Leighton 149) and giving one to both the sender and recipient of exactly the same diameter. The message would be prepared by the sender on a long thin strip of leather or papyrus that would be wrapped around the Scytale to reveal the message to its recipient. Transposition techniques are both popular and in-use to this …show more content…
His contribution to the world of cryptology was the concept of a "cipher disk" and with it, Polyalphabetic Ciphers. According to Appelbaum, a polyalphabetic cipher is any cipher based on substitution, using multiple substitution alphabets." While an incredible breakthrough, it wasn 't Alberti who developed a practical model. This task fell to a man by the name of Giovan Battista Bellaso, in 1553 and was later misattributed to a french cryptographer by the name of Blaise de