Meet Sam. Meet Rita. Sam is an author, Rita is his editor. Sam wants to send Rita his latest book. Meet Jack. Jack wants to get an early copy of Sam's book. Sam sends the book to Rita and Jack gets a copy from one of the servers along the way. He downloads the file to his computer and opens it and, to his dismay-it asks him for a password. "OH NO!" says Jack. The file has been password encrypted.

The word Encryption comes from the ancient art of cryptography. A Greek rooted word meaning "Hidden Writing". Though the Spartans (not the cheerleaders) were the first to use any form of encryption, Julious Caesar used the earliest modern encryption system. This was also known as the Caesar system.

Encryption is simply the process of substitution.,the substitution of one symbol for another. Once all the characters in a document have been substituted, the set of instructions for putting the document back together, or cypher, is stored. In some of the more complicated encryption schemes it would take years to break open some documents without their cyphers, even with the power of a supercomputer.

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