You could do worse than to confuse the meanings of "code" and "cipher"—even cryptographers sometime use the terms as though they had the same meaning. There is, however, a definite distinction between ...

The concluding words of Unsolved! are a call to action. Craig Bauer, a US mathematician and editor-in-chief of the journal Cryptologia, ends his hefty history of cryptography by noting that even as he ...

Here's your chance to crack ciphers similar to those Bletchley Park's codebreakers faced during World War II. Below, we present three ciphers of different levels of difficulty, from easiest to most ...

The theory that statesman and scientist Francis Bacon was the ghostwriter behind Shakespeare, and embedded the Bard's plays with ciphers, had a major influence on modern cryptography. William F.

The National Security Agency can easily defeat the world’s most widely used cellphone encryption, a capability that means the agency can decode most of the billions of calls and texts that travel over ...

Learn to use the cipher utility with confidence. This Daily Drill Down walks you through using every cipher switch and shows you exactly what happens in the real world when you use these switches.