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

Abstract

While 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 first 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.