Today I continued reading the Code Book, and learned about the evolution(or lack thereof) of ciphers in World War 1. In the late 1800s, around the time of the Crimean War, the Babbage-Kasiski method had rendered the Vignere cipher obsolete. After that, cryptography began to stagnate. New ciphers were still devised, but none could match
Read MoreSo far in cryptography history, substitution ciphers were vanquished by frequency analysis. However, a new cipher would rise, one that proved to be the first real challenge to frequency analysis: the homophonic cipher. The homophonic cipher was similar to a substitution cipher, but instead of using one symbol to replace another symbol, there would be
Read MoreAs part of my recent IDS project, I will be chronicling my ‘learning journey’ in the subject of cryptography and cryptoanalysis through a series of posts, each detailing a brief summary of what I have learned and/or accomplished. In the last post, I talked about the earliest type of cryptography: the substitution cipher, and how
Read MoreIn my previous post, I defined substitution ciphers, and how to decrypt them through frequency analysis. In this post, I will discuss various substitution ciphers that were used throughout history. One substitution cipher simply uses a random permutation of the letters of the alphabet as the key; this was the example I used in the
Read MoreAs part of my recent IDS project, I will be chronicling my ‘learning journey’ in the subject of cryptography and cryptoanalysis through a series of posts, each detailing a brief summary of what I have learned and/or accomplished. Today I began reading the Code Book, an excellent summary of the history of cryptoanalysis. I have
Read MoreToday I began my research into the subject of cryptography by reading The Code Book by Simon Singh. One of the first things I learned was the difference between stenography and cryptography. Both are methods of transmitting messaged secretly. However, the methods which both utilize differ greatly. When one sends a message with stenography, they
Read MoreRecently America has had four mass shootings all in the timeframe of one week. I want you to let that sink in. Four mass shootings in one week. Whenever something like this happens, it reignites the heated gun control argument which has been plaguing American politics ever since the Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929. And some politicians have found
Read MoreYou all have probably heard of the now-infamous Facebook event encouraging people to ‘raid Area 51’ on the claim that they ‘can’t stop all of us’, as if the most powerful military in the world can’t stop a horde of unarmed Millenials charging into the most guarded base in America. So far, two million people have
Read MoreA couple of months back, I published a post about behavioral economics and the various biases in human thinking(the link to that post is right here). But I didn’t stop there. I wrote a whole book on the subject: Rational Treasure. A few of my readers might be thinking, what’s the big deal? There are
Read MoreRecently, there’s been one topic that my friends and I could never agree on: legalizing marijuana in Canada. You could probably guess what their arguments are: Drugs are bad! Drugs kill people! Everything’s been going fine now, why change it? And while those are some quite valid, logical, arguments, the truth is much less simple.
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