KHOOR, Crypto, and WWII (Click and see what KHOOR means)

Immediate Disclaimer:  This is not an investment nor scam email to ask you buy cryptocurrency like Bitcoin.

After writing a few articles on self-improvement, let's change a bit and talk about some cool issues I recently learnt.

When people hear of crypto, they usually immediately think of cryptocurrency. Yet, it could also be about cryptography, relating to codes, messages, and securities.

Caesar Cipher

Let's get back to solving what KHOOR means. According to the legend, Caesar would shift each letter in his message by three places in the alphabet, so that A became D, B became E, and so on. Using this decoding method, KHOOR would actually be "Hello".

Still confused? Let's break it down:

 Message to be encoded – Hello

 Encoding Key – +3 (The most basic form of encryption!)

 Encoded message – KHOOR

 Decoding Key – -3

 Decoded message – Hello

Current Use

Indeed, banks and messaging platforms like whatsapp use the similar concept to protect important information. For example, bank transfers encrypt data in transit between the user's device and the bank's servers; and WhatsApp ensures that messages can only be read by the sender and recipient, and not intercepted or viewed by third parties. Certainly, they use much more complicated algorithms (like SSL, TLS, E2EE - don't worry, I don't know about them either) than the Caesar Cipher discussed above.

Cryptography and WWII

Cryptography altered our history. During World War II, the Germans used an encryption machine (named Enigma Machine) to encode their military communications, creating a code that was thought to be unbreakable. For years, the code remained a mystery, until a mathematician Alan Turing and his team broke the code. After that, UK military man could then understand the "secret" messages between the German armies. Not surprisingly, UK won the war afterwards. (I know it is a simplification of matter - but we could all agree this gives the UK army a great advantage?) It is widely considered that the war is significantly shortened Alan Turing and his team's efforts and saved countless lives.

I hope you enjoy this article. Share it with a friend who might be interested!

(P.S. For readers who follow closely, you might know that I am learning about coding. I am still working on it. Indeed, one of the most recent projects are writing a program to illustrate Caesar Cipher mentioned above. Let me know if you are interested and I could share that with you. )