In this exercise, you will develop your own encryption method. It may have some

Question

In this exercise, you will develop your own encryption method. It may have some basis in one of the example methods from the lectures but should have some unique element that you create.

Explain your encryption algorithm so that your instructor or another student is able to use it to encrypt and decrypt a message. In your explanation of how to use the algorithm, encrypt and decrypt the message "This is a test". You may use diagrams or any other method that you think is useful to explain your algorithm

Explanation / Answer

Make your encryption scheme something you can easily remember whenever you look at the encoded information. One or two rules/steps should be enough. If you make too many rules/steps when creating the scheme it will be much harder to recall when you need to use it to decode your information. Show a few samples of encoded information to your smartest friends and see if they're able to decode it within a few minutes. Test out your encryption scheme on unimportant information for a few weeks to make sure you remember it after some time has passed. If you don't, you'll need to come up with a more simple scheme that you won't forget. These are both very simple encryption schemes that pretty much everyone would see as gibberish but you'd be able to decode fairly quickly when needed. You could even use a scheme like this to create secure passwords. We've learned that multi-word phrases already make more secure passwords, and you could easily use this kind of encryption scheme to encode the name of a web site plus a common number of your choice, such as 1296581311518 TwZZFi (Lifehacker 2005). This would make for unique, secure passwords that you could easily store in a service like LastPass, forget, and easily figure out in the event of a data failure. That's just one example of how your own alphanumeric encryption scheme can be useful.

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