HTTPS explained with carrier pigeons

[glennrocksvb]

This is a good article on learning how HTTPS works by reading about Alice, Bob and a lot of carrier pigeons.

[William]

I enjoyed that article, and....

The article mentioned Caesar's Cipher which reminded me of a historical method which is rather old school. When kings sent a message to a general on the battle field by carrier they would send it encrypted by a cipher. An example of the cipher is that each king and general had an exactly matched cipher stick. The stick was the same diameter and shape. The stick would be wrapped with the writing material, and the message would be writ on it. When unwound from the stick the message is completely unreadable, and if another stick of different diameter or shape was used it would continue to be unreadable. Only a matched cipher would reveal the message.




You can try it by wrapping a pencil with a piece of paper which is made into a long strip. Write your message, unwind, and then try using a different cipher stick such as a marker. The message won't be readable.

Just thought some would enjoy this historical cipher.

[glennrocksvb]

Interesting... So they would need multiple strips or tapes when they wrote long messages. How would they know the correct order of the strips to read the whole message?

[William]

Never thought about that nor do I know!

[glennrocksvb]

I found an online Caesar Cipher encryption/decryption tool.

https://www.xarg.org/tools/caesar-cipher/