Cryptography
Where Ancient Ciphers Meet Modern Security
Cryptography is the practice of concealing or coding information so that only the intended recipient can read it. Cryptography is used daily in storing data, electronic payments, securing messages, and authentication.
An important topic that is used often in cryptography is probability. Probability is used to calculate the chances that someone might decode what is encrypted. The lower the probability is that someone is able to guess the code, the more secure that code is. Therefore, a goal of cryptography is to decrease the probability of decrypting a code.
As we explored more about cryptography, we learned about secret sharing. This is done through secret sharing schemes, methods for dividing a secret among a group into parts or shares, where no one share has enough information to find the secret. However, when enough shares are combined, the secret may be decoded. We learned how to find this secret value through different algorithms, such as the additive method and Shamir’s Scheme which uses polynomials.
As part of our cryptography project, we made a podcast about mathematician Allison Bishop. We learned about her education and work in writing, finance and computer science, in addition to cryptography. We were fortunate to interview her and she told how she founded CFAIL, a company that published failed cryptography research papers.
Cryptography seems hard to understand and hard to explain, but if you practice doing it a lot and apply the math to real life applications, the math is easier than it looks. It was interesting working with a math topic we haven’t learned about before. Throughout our time, we learned about probability, secret sharing, and polynomials.
