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 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 ...

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.

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.

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.

The first paragraph gave the key of the code ("The word “words” appears 6 times in the paragraph, 6 is the key to decrypt these clues using the good old Caesar Shift Cipher.") ...

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.

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 cipher is a very simple encryption method and is easily cracked if one studies the frequency of repeating letters. To improve the strength of the encryption method a more complex key could ...