Codes and cryptograms: From yesterday to today. Part 1o & competition

Let us here again for another fascinating journey into the world secrets and encryption! As we have seen there has been interest in articles dedicating to Alan Turing, on the occasion of the film of the same name. With your interest and with the initiative, both mine and iGuru's, we will make a journey (to what else?) among secrets, mysteries, codes and ways of deciphering them throughout the centuries! 

Also, the most enthusiastic readers, that is, those who will be most excited and spend some of their time, will be able to participate in a game and the first five will win licenses (one license each) for a program . The game; You will find out later. :)

 

crypto encryption encryption

 

Let's start our tour now! As you all know and are informed every day now, in the modern world everything around us is encrypted. For every call to our cell phone, for every cable TV that we monitor, for every cash withdrawal from an ATM, we rely on sophisticated electronic encryption to block access to prying ears and eyes.

The Phaistos disk.
The Phaistos disk.

This need for "secrecy", however, is not a phenomenon of our time, for 2.000 years codes and cryptocurrencies have played a key role in politics, military operations, assassinations and the fight against crime. Secret messages determine the outcome of wars, build or dismantle empires, rescue or condemn people.

The success of cryptanalysts is determined by their motivation. Nothing fascinates a man more than secrets, and for some cryptographers the “revelation” is the only motivation. There are also other motives, patriotism, revenge, greed or the desire for knowledge.

Cracking codes and ciphers requires constant interest. Although today it is easy to break her method of cryptography used by Julius Caesar, at that time his opponents showed endless persistence until they understood the alphabetic permutation and discovered its secrets

Decryption requires speed. The RSA Cryptogram is a classic example, based on the quirk that the multiplication of the first two numbers takes a minimum of time, but the revelation of the first two numbers multiplied to produce that particular number may hold forever, even with the use of a computer.

The codes that were created and then broken, determined the course of history. The secret and its revelation capture imagination and explain the regular appearance of decryptors in television and cinematic films.

The world of cryptography does not look like the world of everyday life, it is even more strange than the scenario of the most appealing thriller.

Next we will take a look back at the ancient forms of cryptography, the ancient Pharaohs, Julius Caesar, the Spartans and more. And we will get to the current forms of cryptography in future dedications.

4.000 years ago…

4.000 years ago, the ancient Egyptian scribes carved on the walls of great monuments their religious rites or events of their daily lives. For some strange reason, some elements changed, altering the meaning of the "hieroglyphic" history they engraved.

Their purpose was not to conceal the meaning; instead, they wanted to surprise or entertain the reader, or potentially increase the mystery and magic of religious texts.

Instigated by this practice, they pre-dated the real encryption developed in the next millennium.

Caesar's Secret Writing

Caesar was the most famous leading figure of ancient Rome. He was famous for his courage, his insightful intelligence and his tendency to risk everything. In his military memoirs (Galactic Wars), Caesar describes his skill in "hiding" the content of a message, so that it seems incomprehensible in the hands of the enemy.

When the Roman legions attacked the military forces of present-day France, Belgium and Switzerland, Caesar's officer Cicero was besieged and nearly captured. Caesar wanted to let him know (without the enemy knowing) that help would soon be coming. He sent him in Latin but using Greek characters (something like our familiar Greekish).

The Secret of Polybius

Polybius placed the letters of the alphabet on a 5 × 5 board and put numbers from 1 to 5 in each column and in each row.

CRYPTO1
Example from a table of Polybius.

 

This allows each letter to be represented by two numbers. The letter C, for example, is the 13While W is 52. My name would be "2215344222243443"That is"GEORGIOS".

Caesar's Transcriptional Cryptogram

By the time Suetonius was writing about Julius Caesar, the secrets of his cryptocurrencies were already known. Anyone who wants to decrypt his letters and read them, Suetonius wrote, "must replace the fourth letter of the alphabet, that is, D with A and so on."encryption

This type of cryptographic substituting letters is known as the transitive cryptogram of Caesar. For example, if we want to write Caesar's favorite statement "I came, I saw, I livedUsing its cryptography, the result would be "CYCLIS, THEMIS, IMSNC".

The Combination of Polybius and Caesar

What will happen now if we try to place Caesar's transposition on a board?

We will see with an example! Someone wants to send the message "the ship will sail the dawn in the east".

The first thing we do is put the letters in a table as follows.

encryption

This gives the encrypted message starting from the first column and reading from top to bottom the “Tendencialcontroldigitalandconsultants". Nonsense indeed, for one who is unsuspecting. Then we can make it even harder. Taking the result of the table, we permute by 4 positions as we saw above. That is to say τ is done Χ, the ι is done Μ coke. The result will be: “XHTMLThisSWSWLDXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX".

If the “Tendencialcontroldigitalandconsultants"Was once incoherent, with"XHTMLThisSWSWLDXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX” you really don't know where to start. Coincidentally, if anyone notices, the cryptogram contains only 2 vowels.. Just looking at it is confusing!

So the “the ship will sail the dawn in the east"In a few minutes and in two simple ways it turned into"XHTMLThisSWSWLDXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX".

Challenge For Cod Breakers

As we said at the beginning, the article will contain a challenge game. The game will have to do with the combination of the above examples with some small differences that participants will need to understand in order to solve the puzzle! The solution to the puzzle requires an understanding of what was mentioned above and a little imagination! :)

The coded proposal is as follows:

OBSBUSNFPSVOEBSLVHIHIWLVSADAAATLLLLLLFNHHSUHAIWPSFLNNWPSWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

The first five who will send us by e-mail (at georgios.koliou [at] iguru.gr) the solution of the encrypted proposal, will win a license for an antivirus program.

*** A little help for those who are involved. The letters of the encrypted proposal are 72, so try to find what table they will get. The multiplication of which numbers makes us 72? So x * y table. After that, you need to understand how many positions we have moved the alphabet as in the example of Caesar's transfer.

Good luck!

 

1th winner: Panayiotou Petros

2th winner: Ioannidis Lazaros

3th winner: Aivazoglou Christos

4th winner: Alibertis Giannis

 

Solution

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Written by Dimitris

Dimitris hates on Mondays .....

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