Cryptography - Trial, Error, and Mild Panic

For learning this skill, I first needed sift through and select it among many that came from a vast google deepdive (read: from a random skill generator). Then back to Google to understand what exactly it was.

"Cryptography is the practice of developing and using coded algorithms to protect and obscure transmitted information so that it may only be read by those with the permission and ability to decrypt it."

What it means:

You have a secret. You want to convey this to someone. You scramble the secret before sending it to them. They have a unique unscrambler which they use, and read your secret.

a visual abstraction of cryptography (encryption & decryption)

What next?

I needed to define a finish line for the scope of the 1 week class - and I had no idea where to begin, because all I knew was what cryptography was, not the how, when, where, etc.

My research on day 1 gave me a good understanding of what cryptography is, which admittedly, made me regret picking it - all I saw was python, digital transactions, coding, and on and on and on.

But I did not give up because I remember seeing 'The Roman Emperor's Cipher', and there is no way Caesar encrypted his siege plans using python on his shiny Mac.

As I read further, and my neuron connections kept firing off, this is what I realised:

Modern cryptography = practical usage = computer coding.

What I needed to look at was how cryptography originated and how people practiced it in the pre-computer era.

Back to the Origins

Interestingly, the earliest recorded cryptography was Julius Caeser's 'Caeser's Shift' - where he shifted each letter in his message to, for example, the 7th letter in the alphabet, and his co-conspirator, armed with the knowledge of number 7, would rotate it back to the original letter. So the encrypted (rot7) 'ILOLHK WVTWLF' would be decrypted into 'BEHEAD POMPEY'.

Julius Caeser working on his encryption

I did get into studying more of this - I looked at the Atbash Cipher, another early cryptography system, the Spartan Scytale, the Enigma Machine, how Queen Mary's cracked ciphers lead to her beheading, and many such - and all this was terribly exciting.

Yes, and?

My biggest challenge was - what do I make of this? How do I present my knowledge, which has essentially been a couple nerdy puzzles and some mildly interesting stories up to this point? I spoke to my peers, and from what I could gather, most of them had pretty straightforward presentations where they displayed the skill they had learnt and progressed in - and this did not leave me with any new ideas.

But how? This period of muddle and panic captured me sifting through my journal, trying to see if there was something that would spark a previously unlit lightbulb in my head.

Design Mindset = Clearing the Fog

Let's see.

What got me interested in this?

1. Cool stories where cryptography played a huge role in shaping the narrative.

2. To experience the thrill of cracking a code.

3. The satisfaction of acquiring the prospicience to extrapolate a small cipher to a real modern world application.

Abstraction is extremely important - in this case, abstract the skill as to make sense to my college mates.

Now all I needed to do is share this with my peers in a way they would unwittingly and willingly acquiesce to absorbing the knowledge shared.

And?

I have a hypothesis. The simplest, and a very amusing, way to get the average man to do something they are reluctant to, is to frame the task as challenge, or as a competition to win, or better yet, a timed challenge. Competition is magnetic.

And therein, lay the answer to all my questions.

I would create a game where my peers are competing against each other, and time, to solve and win, and this game would be pretty complex.

I even studied basic game theory for this (as evidenced by my journal).

However, the nature of our skill-exhibition prevented my from holding the attention of all my classmates, and for longer than a few minutes, even that of a smaller group of peers - and I had to scale down.

my set-up

In order to hold everyone's interest, I briefly explained cryptography, and a couple popular ciphers (which I would be making them crack) in as little detail as possible, before each of them reached out into a bag and got a random cipher to crack, on the premise that the one to crack it the quickest would get a Gone Mad.

(The fact that every participant received one later on might be slightly irrelevant here.)

Once they were done cracking the code, as the heat of the competition was fading away and the adrenaline lingered, while I still held their interests in the palm of my hand, I said:

What you got a glimpse into now was the foundations of cryptography. The same principle, but a much more complex execution is what you see in digital banking, WhatsApp, etc. This is what they mean when they say 'end-to-end encryption' on WhatsApp. Now you know!

Honestly, if I do say so myself, mic drop. My job was mostly done - I gave my peers the thrill of cracking a puzzle, and its extrapolation into real world.

The one thing I was unable to do was tell my cool nerdy stories - but I walk away from this exercise armed with a lot of knowledge (namely, how to learn and abstract and present), so I'll take this as a win.

To Caese* and Conclude:

Cease not my learning or exploration, but this blog.

Owing to this course, I will now make a learning a constant parallel at any point in my life.

My process through this entire exercise was not linear - I began as an optimist with an indistinct, foggy vision of the road ahead, muddling through google, trying to define what I wanted to learn, being open to anything interesting that could crop up - to frustration due to a lack of a proper foundation for and definition of my knowledge, to a couple aha moments to feeling accomplished.

Initially, I circled back a few times to go a different direction, or hash out a different path, and although not every decision I took was informed or justified or based on more than my then whim, looking back it is interesting to see how all those decisions cumulated in me learning a whole new skill, and being pretty informed about it.

I have no doubt that anytime I hear or read any of the terms related to cryptography, my ears will perk up and I will add more knowledge or connect more of these dots in my head.

My new goal is to add as many as these domains to my repertoire as possible, and I know, now I will - because this was a new barrier broken: my comfort zone.

Thank you for reading!

*the 'caese' is a play on Caeser - the proper spelling is 'cease'.