Have you read the novels “The case of the dancing men” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and “The Gold-bug” by Edgar Allen Poe?
If not, please do so! Not only is reading good for your mind, but these two books will also give you a glimpse into the mind of a hacker. The hackers here are the protagonists of the novels – the famous detective Sherlock Holmes in the former and William Legrand in the latter.
Here’s something you can do at home with your kids, your siblings or your friends. First, write down a message. For example:
Arrange the words in the message in 4 letter words:
Put this down in a table with the letters arranged column-wise:
| P | A | R | T |
| Y | A | T | P |
| I | X | I | E |
| L | A | B | S |
| O | N | 1 | 7 |
| T | H |
And now you can form a new message by taking the letters row-wise, which becomes:
“PYILOT AAXANH RTIB1 TPES7”
This is now in a format nobody can understand. As long as your friends have an understanding on how to decipher this message, viz. using a 4-column box (which is fixed) and filling this message row wise with the number of rows being the length of the words in the message (in this case, 6 letters), nobody else will understand it.So now you can message your friends in a group “PYILOT AAXANH RTIB1 TPES7” and see how many turn actually up!
This is the essence of cryptography. The cipher text is the secret message which could be derived using a “key”, which the understanding or an agreement the sender and receiver of the message have in order to understand the message.
Prior to advances in cryptography in the 20th and 21st centuries, people used cryptograms. Julius Caeser used cryptograms, known as the “Caeser cipher” to secretly communicate with his commanders and evade loss of war-time intelligence to the enemy every time a messenger is captured. But cryptograms over time proved to be weak, with Frequency Analysis. Frequency analysis is the language study using the most commonly used alphabets and combinations in a sentence such as ‘e’, ‘t’, ‘a’ with double letters such as ‘oo’ or ‘ea’. In “The case of the dancing men” we can see how Sherlock Holmes brilliantly breaks secret codes using frequency analysis and solves the case.
Everything with potential evolves into more potent things – that is the fact of life. Since the advent of cryptograms and information technology, scientists have scrambled to create methods to improve the efficiency of preserving the confidentiality of data. A prime example is the Advanced Encryption system (AES) which requires a number of super computers to crack it. Other than that, there are military-grade encryption systems which are not allowed to be used commercially or publicly which are considered top-notch.
For data stored on a database or a word document (referred to as “data at rest”) or if being transmitted (referred to as “data in motion”), cryptography has become an integral part of our everyday lives and keeps us safe without us knowing it. If you have used password-protected zip or 7-zip files, you’re already a seasoned user of crypto tools. There are simple laptop-run tools in abundance that can crack open a zip file nowadays without a password which has prompted the creation of more sophisticated encryption tools for everyday use. Hence, hackers use social engineering methods to extract information on decryption keys, most commonly used in the form of passwords, PINs and smart cards.
Though the evolution of crypto-algorithms has happened in leaps and bounds, the risk of failure is still large because all it takes is the compromise of the key. Hence, it is essential to calibrate your behaviour by understanding the virtues and application of cryptography, and by choosing the right tool you can keep your data confidential in this world of spyware and hackers.
