A Fanciful Tale about Cryptography
In our modern society, information privacy is essential. If people knew your credit card number, you could lose lots of money. If your medical records became public, a potential employer may decide not to hire you. If a foolish remark you made when you were ten years old circulated on social media sites, you could be banned from public office. And if a snooper catches you sending certain kinds of sell all my shares emails, you could go to jail for years and years.
Methods for sending secret messages have been around for millennia. One of the older methods is called the Caesar Cipher because it’s named after the emperor himself – Julius Caesar. But secret messages can be intercepted and decrypted. One of the most famous cases took place during World War II when a team of researchers led by Alan Turing created a device to decrypt German military communications.
A common way to encrypt a message is to mix the message’s content...
