The roots of modern cryptography: Leon Battista Alberti's "De Cifris"

Abstract

hile cryptography is almost as old as writing, its earliest applications were rather trivial and relatively easily broken via statistical analysis, as Al-Kindi proved in the VIIIth century. Modern ciphers deceive statistical analysis thanks to complex algorithms and ciphering keys. The very fi rst concept of these can be found in a 1466 manuscript by Leon Battista Alberti, the importance of which was for many years overlooked. This paper focuses on the work by Alberti and its impact, within the framework of a brief and necessarily incomplete history of cryptography.

Not Disk but System: The Meaning of "formula" in Alberti's De Cifris

“…However, in the early days of human society, people encrypted and decrypted mainly by hand, and it was only around the Renaissance that mechanical encryption and decryption methods emerged [1]. A significant contribution to the development of cryptography was made by the famous Italian architect, artist, and mathematician Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) [2][3][4][5][6].…”