The Five Eras of Cybersecurity

I believe there are five eras of cybersecurity. In the first, we ciphered our messages using methods that were fairly robust against pen-and-paper attacks but struggled against the ever-rising power of computers, and in the most recent, we will break down most of the things that we have built over the past few decades — and thus build a more secure, resilient and privacy aware digital world.

Era 1: The Pen and Paper Era (aka The Stone Age of Cybersecurity)

And, so, where do we need to keep things secret? Well, basically, in times of love and war. For centuries, we have used ciphers to encode and scramble secret messages so that our adversaries cannot determine our motives or plans. Mary, Queen of Scots, for example, used her own cipher to send secret messages, and while her cipher looks a bit nieve these days, it was good enough for her at the time to evade prying eyes.

There were basically two types of this type of cipher. The first was simple, and just basically mapped our letters onto other letters or systems, and where only Bob and Alice knew the mapping. A more advanced method allows a secret key to be used by Bob and Alice and then generate the mapping based on this key.

But, computers came along, and they were fast at trying lots of different cipher permutations and…