Although the Enigma was cracked, and WW2 was over, cryptography was still changed forever. What used to be done with pen and paper is now being done with devices. Codes that were once cracked by linguists are now cracked by mathematicians. It was the beginning of a new era.

And coinciding with this new era of cryptography was the era of computers. In fact, the digital age changed cryptography even more significantly than electricity. Digital messages aren’t transmitted as words, but as binary numbers, meaning that cryptographers no longer had to work with just the alphabet, they could work with numbers.

The first idea for a modern encryption method was simply to take a key, like a number, and multiply it with the message.

Print Friendly