Cryptography Essay Example

The term cryptography is derived from Greek and roughly translates to “hidden writing.” Cryptography is the process of hiding information by utilizing various mathematical techniques to secure information by presenting the information in an unreadable format that only the intended person is able to read it. Many historians point to the use of encrypted clay tablets and hieroglyphics as the start of this secret code writing known as cryptography in Mesopotamia circa 1500 B.C and in Egypt in 1900 B.C.E (Kessler & Phillips, 2020). The modern study of cryptography has evolved as a division of computer science that utilizes mathematical functions, specifically number theory, to encrypt information so that it cannot be recognized by unauthorized parties. This process usually consisted of two steps, encryption, and decryption. It takes readable text, known as plain text, and transcribes it into a series of characters that can’t be understood. The process to create this series of unrecognizable characters is known as encryption and creates was is known as the ciphertext. This serves as a way of transmitting information in a way that only the intended person can read it. Decryption is the process that transforms the encrypted information back into its original format. This process of encryption and decryption has been adopted as a way to protect all of our data; it helps encrypt online transactions, purchases made with credit card electronic chips, banking information, and authorization when we use a password to log in to an online account. One of the main dangers with these online transactions and exchanges of data is that private data is being sent through a public network, known as the internet, in order to reach the intended receiver such as the bank. The need to keep this information safe led to the creation of secure ways to hide important information through number theory. As stated by Ghosal (2021), “Number theory is probably one of the most important areas of Mathematics used in Computer Science and the basics behind all of modern Cryptography… Number theory began as the study of integers but has evolved to become a field of discipline centered around the study of advancing the understanding of integers” (p.35). Some of the earliest well-known forms of cryptography that utilized elementary number theory were known as the Caesar cipher and the Vigenere cipher. These ciphers involved a shifting of the letters in the alphabet to encrypt a message. These methods began and evolved as a method of hiding information; through the evolution of number theory, these methods changed from simple shift ciphers to block ciphers where data is encrypted in blocks through the use of a key like the Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) cipher. This paper investigates the correlation between the earliest forms of information hiding, before cryptography was established as an official field of study, and correlates it to the RSA cryptographic algorithm that utilizes advanced number theory to secure information.Three things that all of these cryptography systems have in common are the number theory methods behind the ideas of encryption and decryption as well as the correlation of number theory to the downsides of the method to protect the information in the cipher.