Created by IntegratedTechClass on Oct 20, 2008
Last updated: 10/24/08 at 06:32 AM
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The british mathematician, computer scientist and philosopher Alan Turing solified the mathematical approach to cryptanalysis.
The British engineer Tommy Flowers designed Colossus (the world's first programmable electronic computer) to help Bletchley Prak crack German codes.
The american civil servant and poker player Herbert Yardley was the first head of MI8, organized in 1917. At war's end he created the "american black chamber" which worked on Japanese codes through the 20's. His book "the american black chamber" (aka "Secret service in America") revealed the inner workings of cryptanalysis organizations and was very well received in Asia.
THe french teacher and writer Auguste Kerckhoffs contributed greatly to both cryptography and cryptanalysis. He formulated procedures for long-term diplomatic codes as well as inventing the Superpositioning technique for code breaking.
This method, developed by Samuel Morse in 1832, is a way to encipher the letters of the alphabet into long and short sounds. Morse code along with the invention of the telegraph helped people communicate over long distances. Morse code can be used in any language and take a 1 to 10 hours of instruction and/or practice to learn it. The first Morse code sent by telegraph was in 1844.
THe british scientist Sir Charles Wheatstone developed the Playfair Code, a table system that was easy to use. Although not difficult to analyze, it did muddle character frequency techniques by the use of digraphs (coding 2 letters at a time)
The Rosetta stone was found in Egypt, in 1799, had an encrypted message on it in three different languages(Greek, Egyptian, and Hieroglyphics). When deciphered the messages all said the same thing. After the Greek and the Egyptian messages were enciphered it was discovered that hieroglyphics were deciphered by substituting a letter for a symbol.
Arthur Lee, an American, developed a code book which was later adopted by the U.S. amy for use in their military.
The american plantation owner and politician Thomas Jefferson designed a "code-wheel" device for enciphering/deciphering messages.
He created a card with holes in it that was used to create secret messages. after he was finished he removed the card and wrote a letter to fill in the blanks and make the it look like a normal letter. This method was hard to decode unless the decoder ad the card in which had created the message.
The otherwise obscure Italian Giovanni Battista Belaso wrote a pamphlet which mentioned using a countersign or keyword for alphabet selection.
The french diplomat and writer Blaise de Vigenere improved Cardano's autokey system by providing a priming key for the first letter.
The italian physician, mathmetician and writer Girolamo Cardano used plaintext as its own key (autokey)
The german cleric Johannes Trithemius authored "Polygraphiae", the first printed book on cryptology. He also developed the "tabula recta" or squared table polyalphabet
The Italian architect, painter and writer Leon Battista Alberti is noted for creating the first cryptology literature, recognizing the power of polyalphabecy making the cipher disk, and developing alogorithms using enciphered code
Published a manual on cryptology which helped develop a variety of codes and mechanical devices over the next few centuries to encoded, decode, encipher and decipher messages.
The noted Greek philosopher, historian and writer Polybius arranged the alphabet into a squared grid or matrix. By numbering the row's and columns, letters could be transformed into other paired characters.
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