Empowering the Masses

After Gutenberg invented the printing press, more people learned to read. With
more people knowing the reading code, encryption systems such as Caesar’s
cipher were subjected to increasingly educated scrutiny. Secure hiding de-
manded increasingly elaborate encrypting.

Anyone who can read can quickly try all 25 keys. Also, if you figure out just
one letter of ciphertext that corresponds to plaintext, you’ve got the key. For
example, knowing that E is encrypted as K (see Figure 2-6) lets you determine
all the letters in the inside cipher circle by simply filling in the remaining alphabet

in alphabetical order. Well, what to do, what to do? Don’t teach them to read!
Although it may not be ethical or particularly democratic, this approach worked
for quite a long time. Major institutions supported it for centuries (and based on
the reading scores of many American children, perhaps some of them still do).
If you want to keep important secrets hidden from the reading masses, us-
ing 25 alphabetically ordered alphabets does not provide enough complexity. It’s
like using a combination lock that has only 26 numbers on the face—and a one-
number combination key (say, turn to 3) opens the lock.