What is cryptography and how does it work? Interested in the history of the Zodiac killings, but have never really understood cryptography. Thanks
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It’s important to understand that modern cryptography goes way beyond the 5-year old children stuff Zodiak did.
With modern cryptography, the process of encryption is exactly documented, short of one short piece of information, called “key”. This key in most applications is about one page of quite large hand written text in size, or equivalent in bits.
With Zodiak, the entire process was unknown, and the cipher was created to be cracked without even knowing the cipher method. In very important ways, goals of those using cryptography and people like Zodiak are total opposites. Zodiak killer wanted his cipher to be cracked, and he presented cracking it as a game. So he would craft it more or less as a puzzle game.
People using cryptography don’t care about games, they do not want their cipher cracked, and there is this extra requirement of being able to re-use same cipher trillions of times every week using different keys, and have it always give correct message to those with key and nothing for other people.
Basically, Zodiak differs in that, there is no legit recipient to his message. It’s a puzzle game presented to investigators.
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