Crpyotgraphy n Stuff (Weeks 9-10)

What's up whats up?! It's another one of my learning logs and I am sorry that it is late once again. Anyways, I'm supposed to talk about the past two weeks again, aren't I? Hmmm let's see. The thing is, we've only had one actual day where we discussed something about the lecture, and the rest is all about the debates and the presentation of the machine projects.

I suppose I should talk about cryptography first. Cryptography, in its most elementary definition, is the altering of something in such a way that only a certain destination can decipher, which means that the encrypting process was already agreed upon beforehand. One of the earliest forms of cryptography is the Caesar's cipher, where each letter is altered to another letter, either forwards or backwards, according to a certain count. However, this is still rather weak, as one of the criteria for a strong encryption algorithm is that it should eliminate all patterns. Anyone who knows how to do a Caesar cipher can easily crack a message of that nature even if they do not know the letter skip. They merely have to adopt a trial-and-error method.

Encryption algorithms must always be tried and tested. And what better way to do that than to release it top people who would willingly try and crack it for free? This is Kerkchoff's Principle, where it is stated that algorithms must be publicly known to ensure its strength. Also, there will never be an unbreakable algorithm, as Moore's law states that technology is advancing at a very fast pace measured through the number of transistors per square inch of every integrated circuit. Moore saw that this number is actually doubling at a time period of one year, though it has currently slowed down with the change being exhibited only once every 18 months.

There's actually a lot more to the lecture but it gets to the actual algorithms themselves. Asymmetric, symmetric, and a lot of other things. However, I don't really want this blog post to be a another version of the lecture. So if you're interested more about cryptography, read up! It's actually quite interesting.