History of Cryptography
Cryptography gets defined as the art of writing codes and the art of solving them. Transferring information in a format that is secure to protect it is what gets referred to as cryptography.An example of cryptography is the use of messages that get encrypted in engaging in communication, from one device to another to make it difficult for third parties that may be listening in to not understand what the communication is about. Modern cryptography uses secret keys and algorithms that are sophisticated in the encryption and decryption of data. This paper seeks to provide an evaluation of the history of cryptography, describing how it got used and how it grew within history.
Usage
The development of cryptography began with the tension that grew between the United States and the Soviet Union after the Second World War. It became clear that the next country to become a superpower needed the ability to be able to launch as well as successfully defend nuclear attacks from intercontinental ballistic missiles. North America had the North Pole as the attack point that was most vulnerable. As such, Canada and the United States established an effort that is joint in 1958, called the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). They established a semi-automated ground environment as their defensive line, a system that was automated, making it possible for long-distance communication to happen. With this came the need to secure the data that was being communicated across the system as they were able to establish the machine to machine communication. Cryptography was used in ensuring that tracking data that got transmitted through the telephones was secure(Cruise). The information from the radar systems got processed and communicated automatically using the computers.
With the development of communication through computers and electronic money transfers developing, it became necessary to secure the transactions, which made it necessary to create software that could protect it, thus the use of cryptography, using encryption to secure the money transfers. The first public key cryptography got used in 1977 called RSA for the decryption and encryption of data and digital signatures. RSA gets used for encryption of web sites, management of digital rights, among other uses(Professor Messer, 2018). Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) gets used in mobile devices that require an efficient form of cryptography to secure their communication. It is secure and uses a lot of resources and large key sizes. The Federal Information Processing Standard also gets used by the Federal government in securing government data that is classified to protect its secrets from access by their enemies.
The Federal government makes use of NIST’S standards of cryptography and cryptography for the purpose of protecting unclassified but sensitive data that is digitized both in storage and while it is getting transmitted from one device to the other(Barker, 2016). The standards are beneficial in that they provide security, interoperability, saving of costs, quality, and a common reference form. PGP is another form of encryption that is asymmetric got developed in 1991 by Phil Zimmerman, owned by Symantec. PGP is a form of cryptography that is commercial that gets implemented as a software called Gnu privacy guard (GPG). There are several versions of GPG that have been created for various systems, including Windows, Mac OS, Linus, among other operating systems for the purpose of encryption and decryption of data. Mobile devices require the use of Cryptography that is most efficient. With the limited battery amount and CPU power, elliptic curve cryptography gets used instead of making the use of prime numbers that are large in the creation of encryptions for these devices.
References
Barker, E. (2016). Guideline for Using Cryptographic Standards in the Federal Government:
Cryptographic Mechanisms. Retrieved from https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP.800-175B.pdf
Cruise, B. Public-key cryptography: What is it? Retrieved from https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-science/cryptography/modern-crypt/v/diffie-hellman-key-exchange-part-1
Professor Messer (2018). Asymmetric Algorithms-Comp TIA Security+SYO-501-62. Retrieved from https://www.professormesser.com/security-plus/sy0-501/asymmetric-algorithms/