The Evolution of Encryption

First Sign of Encryption Emerges BCE

First found at the tomb of Khnumhotep II, Egyptian scribes used symbol replacement, changing uncommon hieroglyphic symbols and changing grammatical syntax to encode the inscription. This is among the earliest known instances of encoding. 1900

BCE The Time of 100% Analog

One of the earliest encryption devices was a scytale, a leather strap wrapped around a wooden rod. Letters were written on the strap while it was adhered to a speci c width of rod; when unwrapped, or used with the wrong size of 600 rod, the messages were meaningless.

BCE All Hail Caesar!

Around 60 BCE, it is known that Julius Caesar adds ciphers to the encryption mix. Also know as a substitution scheme, these ciphers shift characters by three places - so A becomes D, B becomes E and so on. 60

Many Years Later... Introducing Encryption Machine Theory

Thomas Jeerson created a “wheel cypher” for encrypting military 1795 communications. This cypher system used a set of wheels, each with 26 letters of the alphabet in a random order. Jeerson only used the device briey; it was forgotten and only rediscovered in 1922. In the 1890s, Étienne Bazeries independently invented the same device, now known as the Bazeries Cylinder.

From Rotor Machine to M94 THE

In 1917, American cryptographer Edward Hebern invents the rotor machine, which embeds the key to the cipher on a rotating disk which changes every time a key in typed. Just one year later, German engineer Arthur Scherbius invented the Enigma machine, which uses several rotors to encode the message instead 1900s of just one. The Enigma machine would be pivotal for encrypting messages during WWII.

Similarly, US Army Major Joseph Mauborne invented the M-94 device in 1917, based on similar principles as the Bazeries Cylinder.

The Impact of

Modern Computing Meets WWII Cryptography After being discovered by Polish cryptographer Marian Rejewski in 1932, Polish authorities alerted French and British intelligence services about the Enigma machine – what it did and how it worked. Cryptographer Alan Turing, among others, launched the start of modern computing by using the Bombe Machine to crack the ever-changing Enigma keys – enabling the Allied victory during WWII. After the war, in 1945, Claude E. Shannon of Bell Labs published an article called "A mathematical theory of cryptography” – the rst step towards a rigorous approach to cryptography.

Standardizing Encryption. The THE Invention of Public Key Cryptography

In 1976, the US adopted the IBM-developed Data Encryption Standard (DES) block cipher as a national standard. This was the rst encryption standard of its 1970s kind. Due to its short key size, a variant called 3DES was adopted in the mid-1990s. This remained the standard until 2002.

In 1976, two researchers at Stanford University – Whit eld Die and Martin Hellman – rst publicly proposed asymmetric cryptography – also known as public-key cryptography - in their paper “New Directions in Cryptography.” The Die-Hellman paper outlines a system using pairs of keys – public keys, which may be known to others, and private keys, which must be kept secret by the recipient; this process is considered to be more secure than encryption pre-1970s, all of which used symmetric encryption, using one key for encryption and decryption. A year later, in 1977, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman published the RSA public-key cryptosystem, which became the most widely used scheme for asymmetric encryption and digital signatures.

THE The Birth of Modern Cryptography

In 1984, Blum and Goldwasser published their breakthrough paper called “Probabilistic Encryption”. This was the rst formal de nition of security for encryption, and introduced the theoretical foundations of cryptography. This 1980s approach was quickly adopted across the board, greatly impacting the practice of applied cryptography. In this decade, other major ideas were introduced, including zero-knowledge proofs and secure multiparty computation (MPC). These notions would be studied and improved for close to 30 years, before being ready for use in production to solve real-world security problems.

Introducing Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) was introduced by Victor Miller and Neal 1985 Koblitz, who both independently proposed the idea of using elliptic curves for public key cryptography. ECC-based cryptosystems are assumed harder to break, and can therefore utilize smaller keys to get similar levels to RSA security. ECC entered mainstream use in the mid-2000s.

THE Network Encryption

In 1994, early internet provider Netscape released the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption protocol, designed to secure communications over a computer network and/or internet connection. SSL, and its current successor, 1990s TLS, secure data in transit between server/client and server/server communications.

Harder, Faster, Stronger

In a true nod to a future run on crowdsourcing, a competition opened to the public birthed DES’s replacement – the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) – in 2000. While AES is also a symmetric block cipher, the block size is larger than DES, and it has much longer key sizes. It is not only harder to crack, but faster 2000 as well. AES ocially replaced DES in 2001.

The Emergence of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

In 2009, Craig Gentry proposed the rst plausible construction for a fully 2009 homomorphic encryption scheme, whereby one can perform calculations on encrypted data without decrypting it rst. One year later, Gentry – along with Shai Halevi, Vinod Vaikuntanathan and Marten van Dijk re ned this scheme, with many other variants and improvements following. While rst conceived in 1978, this is the rst time that a concrete homomorphic encryption scheme is constructed.

In a work-from-anywhere world, where everything is digital and we’re constantly connected, ensuring our data is protected is Cryptography more important than ever. Encryption is only one part of the task at hand – to ensure security is at the CORE of anywhere where data is stored, transferred, or transacted. Reimagined

At Unbound Security, we’re utilizing advanced cryptographic techniques like MPC to bring you cryptographic orchestration that is reimagined for the enterprise. Secure any data, anywhere, 2021 at any time.