Activity 2: Summary and next steps

In this activity you learned about four kinds of ciphers (substitution, transposition, permutation and polygraphic ciphers) and you had a go at encrypting and decrypting data manually. This is normally done by a computer, but it is useful to do these exercises manually to understand how these ciphers work.

While it may be interesting to learn about historic ciphers they aren’t much good at protecting data on the internet. Next week we will bring our learning up to date and learn about modern day cryptography.