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Caesar Cipher
Google suggests people, maybe hungry waiting for lunch, are more typically after Caesar's salad. This post however will discuss the legendary Roman general's cipher, which means encrypted text.
The Caesar cipher of the Latin alphabet is one of the simplest methods to encrypt and decrypt data - it's also one of the easiest to crack.
Note however that it required about 800 years for Arab mathematicians to develop frequency analysis to crack Caesar ciphers, which is nevertheless difficult to perform before the advent of modern computers, especially if one uses multiple language sets (such as Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, etc.)
Sticking with the Latin alphabet for simplicity, one can map each letter to a number, such as a: 1, b: 2, ... z: 26.
Then, to encrypt one chooses a secret key from 1 to 25 and adds the key to the message. For a key of 3, "cat" becomes "fcw." One then subtracts the key to decrypt.
This is known as a symmetric key cryptographic method, since the same key is used for encryption and decryption (one just uses addition to encrypt and subtraction to decrypt, which requires the operator to be commutative, which can be proved from the Peano axioms since we're discussing natural numbers).
To get a hands on feel give it a try in ourCaesar cipher demo!
Of course, the Caesar cipher on just the Latin alphabet is extremely weak, as only 26 keys exist so computers can figure out the key by brute force pretty quickly.
If you have any questions feel free to contact us via ryan@supersafelabs.com