But before we see what is Caesar cipher, let us have a brief understanding of Cryptography.
From time immemorial, we are trying to make sure that important and crucial information is readable only by the right people once it has reached its destination. What if a crucial message falls into wrong hands and is read by them? This is prevented by making use of Cryptography and its various strategies.There are a number of ways(or technically called ‘ciphers’) to hide a message and the Caesar cipher is just one of them. This is done by encoding(converting to a special form) the information to be sent at the sender’s end and decoding(re-converting to original form) the information on the receiver’s end.
The field of cryptography is an old one and dates back to 2000 B.C. in Egypt. This same field is now gaining prominence thanks be to the Internet and the security lapses that have sprouted along with it. We see cryptographic principles being applied to many types of industries today.
Caesar Cipher:
Caesar cipher is one of the simplest ciphers to hide and send a message. It is a substitution cipher wherein the alphabets are moved right or left by a number of alphabets.Â
For example,
BLOGGING becomesÂ
CMPHHJOH when shifted right by one alphabet.
The key is the number of alphabets that is shifted right or left. The receiver will have the key and he can decode the hidden message.Â
Can you guess what message this is? 🙂 (when it is shifted right by one alphabet)Â
CMPHHJOH JT GVO
Scroll down for the answer!!
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BLOGGING IS FUN!! 🙂
Have a nice day!! 🙂
I love Caesar cipher. We used this a lot when organizing treasure hunts in college as well as while playing Secret Santa in office.
Oh…wow… Caesar cipher being used in Secret Santas office sounds exciting! 🙂 Nice application of cryptography!! 🙂
I am an IT professional and a coding enthusiast. I remember way back in 1996 when my boss wanted a set of text files to be encoded hurriedly and I just added thirty to the Ascii codes and put them in a text file and decoded by doing the reverse in programming code. LOL!! That was the silliest bit of work I have ever done, but then my boss was in a hurry and was not particularly worried how strongly the files were encoded. That was the pre-dynosaur era. Now of course we have powerful algorithms.
I also belong to the pre-dinosar era and your encoding algorithm sounds fun!:)