Introduction to Cryptography

  • Codes and ciphers are different
    • Codes are made to be understand and publicly available.
  • Ciphers are a set of rules that define how to convert plain text into cipher text

Chapter 1 Exercise

Caesar Cipher Wheel

For this week's exercise, I made a Caesar cipher wheel in Adobe Illustrator. AI has some nifty tools that made this task much easier to draw.

Watch how I created it on YouTube: Link

Download the printable version

Chapter 6 - Caesar Cipher program

The book is dedicated to using Python. However, I'd like to try using Rust to implement the program. I'm still new to using Rust so it was a good way to get initiated into string transformations.

I wrote a small function to encrypt a word passed in as an argument. Also, a reverse function that decrypts a ciphertext back into plain text. In this code, we need to know how big the shift is.

Here is my source code: Link

I had trouble adding to characters in Rust since it is a strongly typed language with strict rules. I got help and inspiration from reading this source code: TheAlgorithms

Next, I will write a general decrypter that cycles through the alphabet and spits out all 26 variations.