Few people realize how common the methods of communication initiated by, among others, Gaius Julius Caesar (100 BC – 44 BC) have become today, and later used with varying degrees of success by such historical figures as the French statesman Cardinal Armand Richelieu (1558-1642), or perhaps spies like Mata Hari (1876-1917) or Richard Sorge (1895-1941). After all, entering a PIN does not really suggest to us that we are indirectly benefiting from the experiences resulting from the construction and subsequent cracking of Enigma – the German encryption machine from the time of World War II.
When visiting a website or logging in with a password, we are unaware that at that moment we have used a cipher, i.e., a method of confidential correspondence. Cryptology, which has been developing extremely rapidly lately, is, according to the PWN Lexicon: “the science of encryption, covering the methodology of encryption (cryptography) and breaking unknown ciphers, i.e., determining the method of encryption as a result of analyzing encoded texts (cryptanalysis)”. Cryptography, on the other hand, is the set of methods for concealing information by means of encryption, and the word “cipher” – according to the same source – derives from the Arabic language and means a code used in certain fields, e.g., when sending secret information. Encoding information is mainly a task in the field of large numbers (combinations of numbers written in the form of 600 or more decimal digits, i.e., from 0 to 9, are used, and numbers with over 200 digits are the standard). Scientists specializing in this field of knowledge today are not linguists or historians, but mainly mathematicians, computer scientists, and cyberneticists. Perhaps, however, the circle of scientists exploring methods of secret or confidential communication will soon expand. Physicists seem to be closest to the field that excites the average citizen today.
The article comes from the magazine “e-Fakty” 3/2005.