Introduction to ciphers and substitution. Alice and Bob and Carl and Julius: terminology and Caesar Cipher ; The key to the matter: generalizing the Caesar Cipher ; Multiplicative ciphers ; Affine ...

Cryptography is nearly as old as human language. Many civilizations felt the need to conceal their messages using more or less sophisticated encryption methods, as demonstrated by some documentary ...

An indicator that a tool or system is working well, especially in programming, is that you never have to think about it. It can chug along in the background, without us giving it any attention.

The arena of creating secure environments in the hardware and software industries is somewhat shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding. Certainly, some types of ciphers are relatively straightforward ...

The 35-year-old saga of Kryptos, an enigmatic sculpture containing four encrypted messages outside the headquarters of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, recently took a bizarre twist.

Before we move into the meat of this article, let’s define a couple terms related to cryptography. The syllable crypt may make you think of tombs, but it comes from a Greek word that means “hidden” or ...

The concluding words of Unsolved! are a call to action. Craig Bauer, a US mathematician and editor-in-chief of the journal Cryptologia, ends his hefty history of cryptography by noting that even as he ...