Activity 2: Overview

In last activity we learned about what cryptography is and what it is used for. In this activity we will introduce some historic ciphers which are great fun to learn about and simple to understand. They aren’t much good for securing data in the modern world but they do demonstrate ideas that still have a role today.

You will also learn about the different types of cipher in this activity.

Learning objectives

By the end of this activity, you should be able to:

• Describe how a number of simple ciphers work
• Apply simple ciphers to encrypt and decrypt messages.