QCE Digital Solutions Unit 4: Encryption basics and classical ciphers
Students learn why data is encrypted and how classical ciphers such as Caesar, Vigenère, Gronsfeld and the one-time pad work and are broken.
One content description from the full QCE Digital Solutions Unit 4 — Digital Methods for Exchanging Data journey. All 19 modules below are in that journey too, with the same content — add just these to a class, or the whole strand.
Modules (19)
1
Why data is encrypted
2
Plaintext
3
Ciphertext
4
Encryption key
5
Protecting data at rest
6
Protecting data in transit
7
Man-in-the-middle attacks
8
Why encrypted data is useless to an interceptor
9
Encrypting data at rest and in transit
10
Encrypting a message with a Caesar shift
11
Decrypting a message with a Caesar shift
12
Caesar cipher wrap-around with MOD 26
13
Breaking a Caesar cipher by trying every shift
14
Frequency analysis
15
Polyalphabetic ciphers
16
Vigenere cipher
17
Gronsfeld cipher
18
One-time pad
19
Why a Caesar cipher is weak compared with modern encryption
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