Today, I lead a cryptography basics session at Jeddah Science Society. We started with the basics of a Caesar ciphers and built up from there to how stream ciphers work. The topics covered:
- Caesar ciphers
- Letter and pair frequency analysis
- Cryptographic wheel mechanism and demo
- Demonstrated a true mechanical random number generator with ping pong balls
- History and applications of one time pads
- Logical gates (AND, OR, XOR)
- XORing actual data for encryption
We wrapped up the session talking about miscellaneous crypto topics such as Heartbleed and Tor.