User:Markscarsi/sandbox

Ancient
One of the earliest forms of encryption is symbol replacement, which was first found in the tomb of Khnumhotep II, who lived in 1900 B.C. Egypt. Symbol replacement encryption is “non-standard,” which means that the symbols require a cipher or key to understand. This type of early encryption was used throughout Ancient Greece and Rome for military purposes.   One of the most famous military encryption developments was the Caesar Cipher, which was a system in which a letter in normal text is shifted down a fixed number of positions down the alphabet to get the encoded letter. A message encoded with this type of encryption could be decoded with the fixed number on the Caesar Cipher.  

Around 800 A.D., Arab mathematician Al-Kindi developed the technique of frequency analysis - which was an attempt to systematically crack Caesar ciphers. This technique looked at the frequency of letters in the encrypted message to determine the appropriate shift. This technique was rendered ineffective after the creation of the Polyalphabetic cipher by Leone Alberti in 1465, which incorporated different sets of languages. In order for frequency analysis to be useful, the person trying to decrypt the message would need to know which language the sender chose.  

19th - 20th Centuries
Around 1790, Thomas Jefferson theorized a cipher to encode and decode messages while serving as Secretary of State to United States President George Washington in order to provide a more secure way of military correspondence. The cipher, known today as the Wheel Cipher or the Jefferson Disk, although never actually built, was theorized as a spool with that could jumble an English message up to 36 characters. The message could be decrypted by plugging in the jumbled message to a receiver with an identical cipher.  

A similar device to the Jefferson Disk, the M-94, was developed in 1917 independently by US Army Major Joseph Mauborne. This device was used in U.S. Military communications until 1942.  

In World War II, the Axis powers used a more advanced version of the M-94 called the Enigma Machine. The complexity of the Enigma Machine was great because unlike the Jefferson Wheel and the M-94, each day the jumble of letters switched to a completely new combination. Each day’s combination was only known by the Axis, so many thought the only way to break the code would be to try over 17,000 combinations within 24 hours.  . The Allies used computing power to severely limit the amount of reasonable combinations they needed to check every day, leading to the breaking of the Enigma Machine.

Modern
Today, Encryption is used in the transfer of communication over the Internet security and commerce. As computing power continues to increase, computer encryption is constantly evolving to prevent attacks.