Communication security and privacy

Before telegraph was invented, most of the information was exchanged by written letter. The writer and the receiver were the only two who could read the letter. However, exchanging information via letter was very slow and it was vulnerable to interception. Therefore, scientists in the nineteen century came up with the idea of using telegraph for long way communication. The telegraph had the advantage of speed so communication via telegraph was dominant in Europe and America in the nineteen century. However, if someone wanted to send the message via telegraph, he had to pass the message to the telegraph operator. Morse code was mostly used for the telegraph communication but Morse code itself is not cryptography. It just consists of dashes and dots. The telegraph “coded message” in nineteen century was basically plain text message. This issue of privacy motivated the use of a more secure cipher like the Vigenere cipher.

In nineteen century, telegraph revolutionized long way communication. In 21 st century, it is the Internet that changes the way we communicate. Examples are email, social network, skype etc. As the Internet develops, the privacy we have decreases. Nowadays, a hacker could steal anything we own with a few clicks ( bank account , social security, credit card etc). As technology develops quickly from the telegraph in 19 centuries to Internet in 21 st centuries, scientists must come up with new ideas of cryptography to protect our privacy. One of the most common way to encrypt information on the Internet is the “public key encryption”. This encryption is very secure and simple. Basically, it has two keys : the public that known to everyone and the private that is secret. You need both keys to decrypt the message. Even though the Internet lack of privacy brings us the feeling of insecure for our information , it is a motivation for scientists worldwide to create a more secure cipher like the Vigenere cypher. As the battle of “good guys” — scientists and “bad guys”-hackers continues, we will see a new kind of encryption that is even more complicated than we have now.