Question

Friedrich Wilhelm Kasiski published a solution to the Vignere cipher in 1863. Before this, an example of the cipher had already been cracked by this English inventor:

Answer 1

Friedrich Wilhelm Kasiski published a solution to the Vigenère cipher in 1863. Before this, the English inventor and polymath Charles Babbage had independently cracked an example of the Vigenère cipher.

Step-by-step explanation:

In 1863, Friedrich Wilhelm Kasiski, a Prussian infantry officer and cryptanalyst, published a method to break the Vigenère cipher, a polyalphabetic substitution cipher. However, prior to Kasiski's work, Charles Babbage, a renowned English inventor and mathematician, had already independently cracked a Vigenère cipher example. Babbage is best known for his contributions to the development of the first mechanical computers, but his work extended to various fields, including cryptography.

Kasiski's breakthrough involved exploiting the repeating nature of keywords in the Vigenère cipher. By identifying repeating sequences in the ciphertext and calculating the distances between them, he could deduce the length of the keyword. Babbage, likely drawing on his extensive mathematical and analytical skills, also made strides in understanding and breaking the Vigenère cipher. The independent efforts of Kasiski and Babbage reflect the collaborative and evolving nature of cryptographic advancements during that era.