Encryption allows for only two people to understand the message being sent, the person who sent the message and the person expected to receive the message. The great Julius Caesar created his own form of encryption known as the Caesar Cipher. While his cipher or encryption technique was primitive compared to today?s encryption techniques, this is one of the first documented cases of encryption being used to protect information transporte

Should an operator wish to send a secret message, the operator must rotate the scramblers to a particular starting position. Since there are 3 scramblers and 26 letters on the alphabet, there are 17,576 possible starting positions. The initial setting determines how the message will be encrypted. This initial setting is the key to the encrypted message. The keys or the initial settings are dictated by a codebook with a new key or setting for everyday of the week. The people involved with the communications network would be responsible that everyone within the network received a codebook every four weeks. In order for anyone to receive the message, the recipient of the message would have to possess an Enigma machine. To decrypt the message all they would have to do is set the machine to the appropriate daily setting and then type in the ciphertext letters, which would light up the plaintext letters on the board.

Navajo volunteers enrolled into the army and served as communication experts to corresponding commanders and troops. Navajo soldiers were sent into the battlefield and reported any necessary information to their commander in their native Navajo dialect. On the other end receiving the message was another Navajo Indian translating it into English so that the commander could understand the message being sent and react as he saw fit.

The Caesar Cipher was first put into practice during the Gallic Wars. Julius was struggling to contact Cicero, who was under heavy attack and on the verge of surrendering his position. Caesar was able to have a message delivered to Cicero that stated help was on the way and not to surrender. The technique employed within the cipher was a simple three-letter shift of the Roman alphabet. So a simple message like ?Hold On? would be encrypted as ?Krog Rq?. Now without knowing the key (the fact that it is a three letter shift down the alphabet) it would be quite difficult to decipher the message without extensive exploration into the message. The full potential of a simple Caesar Cipher encryption could produce 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible keys. If an enemy code breaker were to check one of the 4.0 x 10 to the 26th possible keys every second, it would take roughly a billion times of the lifetime of the universe to check all of them and to decipher the message.

The simplicity and strength of Julius? cipher was dominant during the time of the first millennium A.D. Code makers saw no need to develop any other ciphers. As time passed, the code breakers began to learn the weakness of the Caesar Cipher and used a combination of linguistics, statistics, and devotion to crack the code. The breakdown of the cipher called upon code makers to new and more improved encryption methods. Jumping ahead a number of centuries, encryption plays a critical role during World War II.

There is a type of encryption that will actually use both the public key and the symmetric key at the same time to achieve its goals. This is known as the Secure Socket Layer or more commonly presented as SSL. SSL will use the four main objectives of encryption that include confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and nonrepudiation. Nonrepudiation is the ability to have proof that the sender actually sent the message. SSL was actually first introduced by Netscape and has become one of the premier tools in order to transmit credit card numbers, private information, and any other financial data that requires enormous security. The way it works is that a public key will be used to confidentially transmit a key which can then be used to conduct symmetric key encryption. The first step in SSL is to have a customer contact the company via the internet using a browser that will support the SSL process. The c

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