FIRST CRYPTO SYSTEM: ENIGMA MACHINE

Alan Turing was an excellent mathematician. He is considered a pioneer of computers and artificial intelligence. Born in London in 1912, he studied at both Cambridge and Princeton universities. Before the start of the Second World War he was working part-time for the British Government and the Cypher School. In 1939 Turing took up a full-time role at Bletchley Park. Top secret work was carried out here to decipher the military codes used by Germany and its allies. The Enigma code produced by the Enigma machine was cracked by a machine invented by Alan Turing.

After the war, he continued to work in computer science and artificial intelligence. He dreamed of producing machines that could think. He is the creator of Turing tests, which are used to determine whether the communicating entity is a human or a machine. He was arrested on the grounds that he was homosexual. Under the conditions of the period, homosexuality was considered a crime. As a result of the punishment he received, he would either be castrated with hormone therapy or sentenced to 2 years in prison. He preferred hormone therapy because he did not want to stay away from scientific research and studies. All ties with the state and universities were cut off and he was excluded from society. Unable to withstand such pressure over the years, he committed suicide by using cyanide on June 7, 1954.

Origins of Cryptography

Cryptography began in ancient times as a simplified system of notation. However, a more widely used encryption technique was created by Roman times. Julius Caesar and other Roman emperors used simple passwords to protect their private correspondence. At that time, hand-delivered letters and messages carried important information that could decide the fate of an army. However, these were easily intercepted and unsafe for prying eyes. A simple substitution cipher, such as Caesar's cipher, is encrypted by replacing one letter with another letter from the alphabet. In this way, “G” became “D” and “P” became “M”. It was something that required a lot of effort, but it worked.

Over time, more sophisticated ciphers evolved, including substitution ciphers. Letters are swapped and reordered, making the message difficult to understand without the key. Let's give an example of a simple substitution cipher.

KLSDIIAARRSRRLRÇHIAAEEAIİNZL

To create this cipher, a spy would first write letters in a table and then read them in a different order, stringing them together.

AEEAIINZL

SRRLRÇHIA

KLSDIIARR

When you read the letters from top to bottom, the message becomes clear:

SOLDIERS ARE READY FOR THE ATTACK

Over the centuries, ciphers have become increasingly sophisticated against deciphering methods known as cryptanalysis. An effective method of cryptanalysis, known already in the 9th century, is frequency analysis. This examines how often letters and groups of letters are repeated in a ciphertext.

Modern Age Cryptography