COMPUTER FUNDAMENTALS

Detailed explanation-1: -Throughout history, ciphers have been used as tools to convey secret messages. Some are ancient, and some were created during the birth of our country, but all have served the same purpose; to send secret messages!

Detailed explanation-2: -Ciphers are broken into two main categories; substitution ciphers and transposition ciphers. Substitution ciphers replace letters in the plaintext with other letters or symbols, keeping the order in which the symbols fall the same. Transposition ciphers keep all of the original letters intact, but mix up their order.

Detailed explanation-3: -Encryption is the process of scrambling data so that it is unreadable to anyone except those who possess a key that decrypts the data. Decryption is the process of restoring data from its encrypted form.

Detailed explanation-4: -Ciphertext is encrypted text transformed from plaintext using an encryption algorithm. Ciphertext can’t be read until it has been converted into plaintext (decrypted) with a key. The decryption cipher is an algorithm that transforms the ciphertext back into plaintext.

Detailed explanation-5: -Secret codes can be viewed as a symbology, except that now different symbols encode letters instead of numbers. These symbols can be signs (like Morse code or Braille which are just encodings and not ‘secret’), or they can be other letters, or even the same letters themselves.