History
The art of writing and solving codes and ciphers that has been used since ancient times.
Cryptography
Prefix that means "hidden" or "secret."
Crypt-
A transposition cipher that is constructed by wrapping paper around a cylinder to align the letters of the plaintext.
Scytale Cipher
The type of cipher that results from letters being rearranged.
Transposition cipher
The name for the obscure processes that convert input to output.
Blackbox
The type of recipe from Mesopotamian times that provides the earliest known use of cryptography for concealment.
Pottery glaze
A cryptography term that comes from the Arabic word for zero.
A cipher that results from writing a message in a zigzag pattern across a grid.
Rail fence cipher
The best way to become strong at decrypting messages
Encrypting messages
A step-by-step set of instructions for solving a problem.
Algorithm
A series of rotating discs that must be aligned to read.
Cipher wheel
The substitution strategy that early phone texting was built on.
T9
A transposition cipher that follows a given pattern across a grid.
Route cipher
A decryption strategy in which the reader can either know or take a good guess about what type of code they are looking at.
Code recognition
An early step of writing a program for a computer that is not machine-readable.
Pseudocode
The name of a cipher made famous by a Roman ruler in which letters are shifted by a certain number of alphabetic places.
Caesar Cipher
The type of encryption in which the sender and the receiver use the same key.
Symmetric
A substitution cipher that replaces letters with dots and dashes.
Morse code
A statistical application of decryption that involves counting how often each letter is likely to appear in a language.
Frequency analysis
A sequence of steps that will repeat in a code.
Loop
A code during WWII that was broken by early computer technology.
Enigma Cipher
The type of key that allows anyone to encrypt a message in asymmetric encryption.
Public key
A substitution cipher that allows computers to convert numbers to text.
ASCII
A programming language that executes queries against a database.
Structured Query Language (SQL)
The process of putting steps in order before writing a code for a computer to execute.
Sequencing