IST 323 The history of Information Security

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?

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 20^th 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.