Timeline Cryptography - Introduction Besides oral conversations and written language many other ways of information-transport are known: like the bush telegraph, drums, smoke signals etc. Those methods are not cryptography, still they need en- and decoding, which means that the history of language, the history of communication and the history of cryptography are closely connected to each other The timeline gives an insight into the endless fight between enciphering and deciphering. The reasons for them can be found in public and private issues at the same time, though mostly connected to military maneuvers and/or political tasks. One of the most important researchers on Cryptography through the centuries is |
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cryptoanalysis the study of breaking others' codes to transform a message back into a legible form without knowing the key from the beginning |
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codes an algorithm for bringing a legible message into an illegible form. There has to exist some sort of code book to encode/decode it. |
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ciphertext the enciphered/encoded and primarily illegible text |
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