Secrecy, codes and hacking...

The National Cipher Challenge has just started!

Join the Kingsbridge Codebreakers to help try and crack the codes to help us win £3,000 as well as learning how codes are made and to help out with your maths as we go...

Codes have been used for thousands of years from very basic ones such as the Caeser Shift Cipher, used during Roman times to pass secret messages by Roman Emporers to more sophisticated ones such as RSA codes that the whole of internet security relies on. RSA codes use the fact that it's pretty hard, even for computers to break up numbers into its prime factors... especially pretty big numbers... for example try and find the 2 prime numbers that multiply to give 4757 (comment your answer at the bottom of the post...1st correct wins a gold form). A computer can obviously work this out in under a second but even a computer takes a little while to work out the 2 prime factors of a number like: 16152174667064029642647365822885998430666314431815268152405470907824573659036629
72483772980826569393306732864932303362619914669385966910731129686267107921489042
39628873374506302653492009810626437582587089465395941375496004739918498276676334
238241465498030036586063929902368192004233172032080188726965600617167

And it's because it takes soooooooooooo long, in fact, one of the ones that has been cracked took 9 years!!!!.... that we can use this code to encrypt data and websites...

A Caeser Shift cipher (shift 2)

Without understanding the maths behind such codes the world wouldn't be able to function in the way it does.

Check out lots of different codes here.

Better still join Kingsbridge Codebreakers  and learn how to make and crack them!