Quiz Entry - updated: 2026.07.14
What were the major milestones in the history of cryptography?
Key milestones include: ancient ciphers, World Wars code-breaking, Shannon's information theory (1948), DES (1974), and public-key crypto (1976-1978).
| Year/Era | Milestone |
|---|---|
| ~500 BC | Spartan scytale (transposition cipher) |
| ~50 BC | Caesar cipher (substitution cipher) |
| WW1 | Breaking the Zimmermann Telegram helped bring the US into the war |
| WW2 | Breaking Enigma (Turing, Bletchley Park) aided the Allies against Germany |
| WW2 | Breaking Japanese naval codes (Rochefort) was decisive at the Battle of Midway (1942) |
| 1948 | Claude Shannon founds information theory |
| 1970 | Simmons: first theoretical approach to integrity/authenticity |
| 1974 | DES (Data Encryption Standard) defined by NIST — first widely standardized cipher |
| 1976 | Diffie-Hellman — beginning of public-key cryptography |
| 1978 | RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) — first practical digital signature scheme |
Today: Classical encryption is just one part of modern cryptography. The share of user authentication applications is rapidly increasing.