

In the 20 th century, the Caesar cipher was used many a times by lovers in order to send romantic messages in the public section of The Times newspaper. However, the Caesar cipher may still find its use in some trivial applications, where the Caesar cipher could be employed as a simple means just to obscure the meaning of messages.

In today’s age and times of extraordinary computing capabilities, the Caesar cipher is not worth implementing at all as an encryption scheme – it is simply not secure at all. The Caesar cipher, therefore, is evidently quite limited in terms of the encryption capabilities that it can offer. Obviously, we must not consider that ciphertext letter which is identical to the plaintext letter. Therefore, for a plaintext letter, there can be only 25 different possible ciphertext letters. The Caesar cipher belongs to a subset of encryption schemes called substitution ciphers – a substitution cipher is so called because each letter comprising the message gets substituted, which eventually helps in obscuring the meaning of the entire message. The Caesar cipher is a very, very simple encryption scheme that is used to obscure the meaning of a message by shifting each letter comprising the message a few places in the alphabet – it is due to this that the Caesar cipher is also known as a shift cipher. The military secret messages were protected from Caesar’s enemies if they had no idea about how the encryption scheme worked – the Caesar cipher encryption scheme was used to transform the military secret messages into something that looked unintelligible to those who had no idea about the Caesar cipher encryption scheme. The Caesar cipher encryption scheme was used by Julius Caesar and his contemporaries for sending messages containing military secrets. The Caesar cipher, also known as a shift cipher, is credited to Julius Caesar, and thus the name ‘Caesar cipher’. In this article, we will learn about a simple substitution cipher, the Caesar cipher.
