Giovan Battista Bellaso, a 16th-century cryptologist, designed the Vigenere cipher (falsely attributed to diplomat Blaise de Vigenere), believed to be the first cipher that used an encryption key.

Caesar used a substitution cipher, where each letter of the alphabet was replaced by a letter in a different fixed position further up or down in the alphabet.

It turns out that the encryption it uses is just a few baby steps beyond a basic Caesar Cipher. A Caesar Cipher just shifts data by a numeric value. The value is the cipher key.

As discussed above, however, although the Caesar cipher provides a great introduction to cryptography, in the computer age it is no longer a secure way to send encrypted communications electronically.

Mysterious cryptic code suddenly appeared on the Internet in January 2012Cicada 3301"Attracts the interests of programmers and hackers all over the world. Although a lot of people got on reading ...

Some ciphers have simple keys, others, complex ones. The key for a cipher used by Augustus Caesar, some 2,000 years ago, was simple enough: The receiver just had to shift the alphabet one position.

Caesar Ciphers are very simple methods of encryption because the work by shifting the alphabet over a few characters and matching up the letters (see the picture above)—in fact, if you've ever ...

Giovan Battista Bellaso, a 16th-century cryptologist, designed the Vigenere cipher (falsely attributed to diplomat Blaise de Vigenere), believed to be the first cipher that used an encryption key.