Pause and Recap

Messages encrypted with the Caesar cipher are very easy to crack, especially with a computational tool. Now that you've had a little practice cracking an alphabetic shift cipher (pretty easy, huh?) let's try something more difficult.

Recap terminology:

• Encryption - a process of encoding messages to keep them secret, so only "authorized" parties can read it.
• Decryption - a process that reverses encryption, taking a secret message and reproducing the original plain text
• Cipher - the generic term for a technique (or algorithm) that performs encryption
• Caesar's Cipher - a technique for encryption that shifts the alphabet by some number of characters.
• Cracking encryption - When you attempt to decode a secret message without knowing all the specifics of the cipher, you are trying to crack the encryption.

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