Introduction to Encryption and Cryptography CO220
Discover the history of encryption and learn how it's used in the modern world
Summary
Discover the history of encryption and learn how it's used in the modern world
On this course, you will learn about what encryption is and understand its use in the past by using the Caesar and Vigenère ciphers.
You will also look at the present and future of encryption and investigate both symmetric and asymmetric encryption schemes.
The course includes several practical encryption activities which you can complete and use in your own classroom.
There are several optional steps involving using Python to implement some forms of encryption. We recommend that for these you are comfortable using functions with parameters–as covered in our Programming 102 course.
Outcomes
You will be able to:
- Describe the general process of encryption and decryption
- Apply a Caesar Cipher and a Vigenère Cipher
- Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different encryption algorithms
- Compare symmetric and asymmetric encryption
- Produce an implementation of a Caesar Cipher and RSA encryption in Python
- Demonstrate methods of breaking simple encryption schemes
- Describe how encryption is used in the modern world, and some of the possible ethical implications of this