Exciting encryption techniques – any ideas?

I’m looking for them for a school workshop with young people.

Important would be a historical context, pictures / photos / videos or possibly replicas, for an easy introduction to the history of encryption.

I’m interested in any tip. Thanx

Aug 08 · 4 months ago

9 Comments ↓

I just ran into a good one this morning while reading through the RFC 1855 'Netiquette Guidelines' from 1995!

gemini://sdf.org/kinosian/rfc1855.txt

Apparently, it was good behavior in early newsgroups that if you were going to say something potentially controversial or that was a spoiler, you should use Unix's "Rot13" command "(which rotates all the characters in your post by 13 positions in the alphabet)". It's not *complex* encryption, but it made it so that a message wasn't easily read on accident in a fully text-based environment.

I thought that was neat.

Klaus Schmeh, and Elonka Dunin, "Codebreaking: A Practical Guide", No Starch Press, 2023

Ideally, there would also be 3D models of the respective machines or a functional model. A 3D printer is available. Thingiverse offers quite a lot, but I’m grateful for any ideas!

rot13 was "invented" by the romans

You make your own and print some decoder rings

eg.

You can look into the different checkerboards for One Time Pads. Would give them secure hand crypto which is fun.

I remember a very nice video on youtube about the enigma machine. can‘t be more specific though

apparently no one here read the book above. everything (from rot13 to enigma) is explained there in detail, from the point of view of cryptanalysis.

@CarloMonte I am still searching for a moderat price for the book. there is a cheap kindl version of it, but i normally perefere printed ones. thanx again for the recommendation.

@mimas2AC you are welcome. since the used book market collapsed into a monopoly a few years ago, i mostly quit buying and moved to use the inter-library loan system. it is not easy to find an entry point (a public accessible library which participates), but once you are in you have access to *everything*. usually university libraries and a few state-owned ones participate.