Essay (Body)

The history of cryptography begins antiquity. In the antique times, the most used technique was encrypting. To prevent reading the messages by an unwanted person, people used a simple cyphers. For example, Julius Cesar used the cypher, named after in his honour, to encrypt military orders and official messages (McFadden, 2018).

Cryptography is an important part of the military. For every country is important to keep their military data protected against other countries, potentially opponents. In the past, breaking the encryption keys made a milestone point of wars. According to Inman's (2020), breaking the Enigma (German encryption machine used during II World War) key was important in localising the U-Boats and destroying them. Between 1940 and 1943 the number of destroyed U-Boats was over 1100. Some estimates say, breaking Enigma key reduced the Wartime by over one year (Inman, 2020).

Nowadays, cryptography is unseparated part of daily life for many people. Polk and Froncek (2019) claims that encryption seems like the part of science used only by spies, but a lot of people use it every day. For example, all of the popular messaging application use end-to-end encryption system. It is a standard, that websites use HTTPS (protocol, which use encryption to secure connection between two systems (Russell, 2020)), which makes, following the moves on the Internet are more difficult to follow. Paying by credit card is able and safe because the connection between the credit card and card reader is encrypted.

One of the most basics, but the most important way to security is creating passwords, which is encrypted as well. Nohe (2018) described the most common forms of encryption, which are Asymmetric Encryption and Symmetric Encryption. Asymmetric Encryption means, two sides of the connection have two different keys, one of them can only encrypt, and the second one can only decrypt. In that case, the encryption goes only one way. Symmetric Encryption means, two sides have both of the keys, which can encrypt and decrypt as well. The author mentions that, both of the technologies are using the SSL protocol (protocol designed for securing connections between clients and servers over insecure network (Rouse, 2018)). The Asymmetric Encryption usually uses a 2048-bit length key. The Symmetric Encryption uses a 256-bit length key. However, it doesn't mean the Symmetric Encryption is weak. The author thinks the supercomputer will need thousands of years to decrypt it.