Development of Information Security
Here, I want to add a summary for the development of
information security.
People began to protect the information they wanted to deliver
when people invented characters. The proposal to protect information is to
protect a secret or avoid misunderstanding. Under this condition, whisper,
notes, expression in one’s eyes can all be considered as a kind of information
security because all these ways to deliver information can be executed in more
liberal ways. Like we can talk out loudly instead of whispering, we can post a
paper instead of a little note and we can also talk instead of eye contacting.
However, if these public methods to protect information came to the stage of
history, how would the real information security work?
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Steganography |
In the history of information security, the way to assurance
the security is developed with the development of technology, especially
information technology. I think the history of information security can be separated
to four parts.
1. Classical Encryption
Era (BC – Early 20th Century)
2. Modern
Times of Encryption (1920s – 1940s)
3. Modern
Encryption Era (1940s – 1960s)
4. Network
Security Era ( Till now)
During the classical encryption era, people encrypt
information manually. Manual encryption has low efficiency so that only high
level information would be encrypted, like military intelligence. During that
time, the most famous method of encryption was Caesar Cipher. Also, ancient
Greek wrote characters on the wooden backing of a wax tablet before applying
its beeswax surface to achieve steganography. Chinese people wrote the
information in poems in ancient times. The information they wanted to deliver
was every first letter of each line of a poem, but the whole poem was not
related to the information so that others would not notice the information.
Also, during Civil War, the Federal Army widely used code books to protect the
information.
The Era of Classical Encryption was long. The development was
slow because people did not invent a new way to store information. Since human
can only write the characters on paper, we could not have an advanced way to
protect the information. However, since our technology developed, how would the
next three eras look like?
I will talk about the other eras in the next blog.