Introduction to cryptography

* Timespan: December 2022 - January 2023
* Description:
  - Supervised university project, without technical production.
  - Short overview of cryptography and its military applications, from the beginning to the present day.
* Improvement paths:
  - Deliverables lacked concrete technical examples and recent case studies.
  - Add markers to presentation slides (numbering).

This project focused on presenting the history of cryptography and its military applications, using the following topics as a basis:

• The first historically known cryptographic methods (Spartan scytale) and major historical developments (Alberti dial, Vigenère square).
• The Kerckhoffs principle, laying the foundations of modern cryptography and paving the way for the emergence of asymmetric cryptographic mechanisms.
• The main methods of symmetrical cryptography: transposition, single-key interversion and double-key interversion.
• The development of asymmetric cryptography at the end of the 20th century, thanks to the commitment of the following personalities:
  • Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, leading to the design of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange based on mathematical models of elliptic curves.
  • Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, leading to the development of the first encryption algorithm based on the principles of asymmetric cryptography, called RSA from their respective surnames.
• One of the major concepts in information security theory: the Confidentiality-Integrity-Availability (CIA) triad.

This overview was produced jointly with my colleagues Clément Ismail and Yacine Yala.

Documents and deliverables