Chemistry and Cybersecurity

Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE
5 min readJan 19, 2024

In love and war, ciphers have been used to pass secret messages. Now, we typically use strong encryption, but in days gone by, secret messages often used a cipher code. These are typically encoding methods, of translating our letters into another form, or processed using a secret key. A fun encoding cipher uses the periodic table to map letters in plaintext to the number of protons that the element has:

--

--

Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE

Professor of Cryptography. Serial innovator. Believer in fairness, justice & freedom. Based in Edinburgh. Old World Breaker. New World Creator. Building trust.