John F. Dooley - History of Cryptography and Cryptanalysis: Codes, Ciphers, and Their Algorithms

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Cryptology is the science of secret communications. You are likely to use some form of cryptology every day. If you login to a computer you are using cryptology in the form of a one-way hash function that protects your password. If you buy something over the Internet, you are using two different forms of cryptology public key cryptography to set up the encrypted network connection between you and the vendor and a symmetric key algorithm to finish your transaction. These days much of the cryptology that is in use is invisible, just like the examples above. It wasnt always so. The story of cryptology goes back at least 2500 years and for most of that time it was considered an arcane science, known only to a few and jealously guarded by governments, exiled kings and queens, and religious orders. For a time in the European Middle Ages it was even considered to be a form of magic. It is only recently, really beginning in the twentieth century, that cryptology has become known and studied outside the realms of secret government agencies. Even more recently, the study of cryptology has moved from a branch of linguistics to having a firm foundation in mathematics.

This book is a history of cryptology from the time of Julius Caesar up through around the year 2018. It also covers the different types of cryptographic algorithms used to create secret messages and it discusses methods for breaking secret messages. There are several examples in the text that illustrate the algorithms in use. It is, of course, not meant to be a comprehensive history of either cryptology or the algorithms themselves. Rather I have tried to touch on a substantial subset of the important stories in cryptologic history and the algorithms and people involved. Most of the chapters begin with a story that tries to illustrate the importance of cryptology in that particular time period.

I teach an upper-level undergraduate survey course in Cryptography and Computer Security and the contents of this book is covered in that course where I do a review of the different cryptographic algorithms from an historical perspective. My goal in that course is to give the students a better understanding of how we got from the early days of pencil and paper secret messages to a place where cryptology is pervasive and largely invisible. This book could easily serve as the text for part of a course on computer or network security, as a supplemental text for a stand-alone course on computer security, or as a primary text for a course on the history of cryptology. No mathematics is required beyond what a computer science or mathematics student would see in a course on discrete mathematics. If you want to pursue a more comprehensive treatment of the history of cryptology I recommend David Kahns excellent book The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing, and for a more mathematical treatment, Craig Bauers equally good Secret History: The Story of Cryptology .

The book is organized chronologically. The main focus is on twentieth and twenty-first century cryptology, if, for no other reason, that there is much more written about these periods. Cryptology has begun to escape from the secret confines of governments. In the post-World War II era there is a lively and robust group of researchers and developers focusing on cryptology for private and business applications. At the end of each chapter are references to source material covered in the chapter and these usually include books, magazine articles, web pages and scholarly papers that will make good additional reading for interested readers.