Cryptology has a long history, beginning around 1900 B.C. – when non-standard hieroglyphs were used by the Egyptians
on monuments and in clay tablets. Many today believe that these were meant more for intrigue and entertainment than for communicating secrets. It wasn’t until around 1500B.C., that the Mesopotamians utilized cryptology to protect recipes (for pottery glazes, etc) that were of commercial value.
Throughout the course of the next 1000s of years, more methods of cryptology were being produced and used – particularly among the military and those seeking to practice religion without being persecuted. In 500B.C., hebrew scribes used a reversed alphabet substitution cipher called ATBASH to write the book of Jeremiah. Just 13 years later, the Spartans of Greece developed a system called skytale that used a papyrus and a wooden staff to encrypt messages.
Julias Caesar was also known to have incorporated and even devised new means of cryptology to help his military pursuits. In 50B.C., Caesar is credited with creating a cipher that shifted the letter of the alphabet three places. To further enhance the security of the cipher, Caesar also changed the letters of the alphabet from Latin to Greek.
Throughout much of the last 2000 years, the standards of today’s cryptology have emerged. Throughout the first thousand years, writers such as Abu Wahshiyyaan-Nabati published cipher codes, alphabets, and other aspects of cryptology. Moving further, an Arabic encyclopedia in 1412 had a section on cryptology. Then, in 1466, Leon Battista Alberti (who is considered the Father of Western cryptology), designed a cipher disk and worked with polyalphabetic substitutions.
The year 1518 brought the first printed book about cryptology by Johannes Trithemius. He also invented a steganographic cipher around the same period. Passwords were introduced in 1553 by Giovan Batista Belaso. The first uses of steganography were used by Sir Francis Bacon in 1663 by hiding additional letters within the font of the text.
Thomas Jefferson is also credited for having a hand in the cryptology sector, by inventing a 26-letter cipher that he would use in official communications while serving as an ambassador to France.
More recently, British troops in World War I broke the Zimmerman Telegram – which was a German communication meant for Mexico that offered the Mexicans US land in return for their help with an invasion.
Similarly, during World War II, the allies secretly broke the Enigma cipher. Many attribute this feat as single-handedly bringing the war to a close as much as 2 years earlier than otherwise possible. Navajo “code talkers” were also employed as a means of US communication. There efforts proved immensely valuable to the allied cause, and there code of encrypted Navajo language (a language that was unwritten at the time), proved to be unbreakable by opposing forces. There communications were invaluable in the allied siege of Okinawa.
In 1976 Whitefield Diffie and Martin Hellman brought the idea of a public key system into the public view. In 1977, the RSA family of computer encryption algorithms was born. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) was ratified in 1991. The Riijndael cipher was selected as the Advanced Encryption Standard in 2000.
