Data Encryption: How Encryption Works

The desire to keep and hold secrets is ageless. Cryptography in the form of basic ciphers has existed from the times of the Greek and Roman civilizations. These were rudimentary in nature and mainly designed to obfuscate messages so they didn’t make sense if they fell into the wrong hands. An early example called the Caesar Cipher basically shifted characters by 3 places (e.g. A = D, B = E, C = F, and so on). Such a cipher is called a substitution cipher. A modern example, called ROT13 is a modified version of the Caesar cipher that simply shifts characters by 13 places (instead of 3).