Secret facts & stats

Question 1

In a Caesar cipher with a shift of 3, what does the letter A become?

Accepted Answer

D. A Caesar cipher shifts each letter a fixed number of places, so with a shift of 3, A becomes D.

Question 2

Which carved stone helped scholars decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs?

Accepted Answer

The Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone carries the same decree in hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek, which unlocked hieroglyphs.

Question 3

Which rotor cipher machine with a typewriter-style keyboard did German forces use in World War II?

Accepted Answer

Enigma. Enigma used rotating wired wheels to scramble letters; Allied codebreakers learned to read its messages.

Question 4

At which British site did codebreakers work to break Enigma during World War II?

Accepted Answer

Bletchley Park. Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire was the main Allied codebreaking center in World War II.

Question 5

In cryptography, what is 'plaintext'?

Accepted Answer

The original readable message. Plaintext is the readable message before encryption; the scrambled result is called ciphertext.

Question 6

What is the practice of hiding a message inside something else, like an image, called?

Accepted Answer

Steganography. Steganography hides the very existence of a message, while cryptography hides its meaning.

Question 7

Which 9th-century Arab scholar wrote the earliest known description of frequency analysis?

Accepted Answer

Al-Kindi. Al-Kindi described breaking ciphers by counting how often letters appear in the 9th century.

The basics