From the course: Computer Science Principles: The Internet
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Improving security with longer keys
From the course: Computer Science Principles: The Internet
Improving security with longer keys
- A simple Caesar cipher tells you how many characters the entire message will be shifted. We can store this as a single character. This is an example of a single-bit level of encryption. We have a single value we're using to scramble the information. The issue, though, is that a single bit isn't very sophisticated to scramble a message. If we have a message with a single bit of encryption, I could simply flip through a single set of possibilities and eventually find the answer. To make this more complex, we need to add additional bits. So we could double this key from one bit to two. We could say that the first letter is shifted by two, and the second is shifted by five. We would then take that and apply that repeatedly for all the letters in the message. Now, it is more complicated to try and figure out what the key is to decipher the message. Now we'd have to try more combinations in order to figure out the message. The more bits we add to the key, the more complex it becomes to…
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