Timeline of cryptography

Below is a timeline of notable events related to cryptography.

BCE

• 3500s - The Sumerians develop cuneiform writing and the Egyptians develop hieroglyphic writing.
• 1500s - The Phoenicians develop an alphabet
• 600-500 - Hebrew scholars make use of simple monoalphabetic substitution ciphers (such as the Atbash cipher)
• 100-0 - Notable Roman ciphers such as the Caeser Cipher.

CE

• 1000 - Frequency analysis leading to techniques for breaking monoalphabetic substitution ciphers. It was probably motivated from textual analysis of the Koran.
• 1450 - The Chinese develop wooden block movable type printing
• 1450-1520 - The Voynich manuscript, an example of a possibly encoded illustrated book, is written.
• 1586 - Cryptanalysis used by spy master Sir Francis Walsingham to implicate Mary Queen of Scots in the Babington Plot to murder Queen Elizabeth I of England. Queen Mary was eventually executed.
• 1614 - Scotsman John Napier (1550-1617) published a paper outlining his discovery of the logarithm. Napier also invented an ingenious system of moveable rods (referred to as Napier's Rods or Napier's bones). These were based on logarithms and allowed the operator to multiply, divide and calculate square and cube roots by moving the rods around and placing them in specially constructed boards.
• 1793 - Claude Chappe establishes the first long-distance semaphore telegraph line
• 1831 - Joseph Henry proposes and builds an electric telegraph
• 1835 - Samuel Morse develops the Morse code
• 1855 - For the English side in Crimean War, Charles Babbage broke Vigenère's autokey cipher (the 'unbreakable cipher' of the time) as well as the much weaker cipher that is called Vigenère cipher today. Due to secrecy it was also discovered and attributed somewhat later to the Prussian Friedrich Kasiski.
• 1894 - The Dreyfus Affair in France involves the use of cryptography, and its misuse, in regards to false documents.
• April 1943 - Max Newman, Wynn-Williams, and their team (including Alan Turing) at the secret Government Code and Cypher School ('Station X'), Bletchley Park, Bletchley, England, complete the "Heath Robinson". This is a specialized machine for cipher-breaking, not a general-purpose calculator or computer.
• December 1943 - The Colossus was built, by Dr Thomas Flowers at The Post Office Research Laboratoriesin London, to crack the German Lorenz (SZ42) cipher. Colossus was used at Bletchley Park during WWII - as a successor to April's 'Robinson's. Although 10 were eventually built, unfortunately they were destroyed immediately after they had finished their work - it was so advanced that there was to be no possibility of its design falling into the wrong hands.
• 1948 - Claude Shannon writes a paper that establishes the mathematical basis of information theory
• 1969 - The first hosts of ARPANET, Internet's ancestor, are connected.
• 1976 - Cray-1, the first commercially developed supercomputer, was invented by Seymour Cray, who left Control Data in 1972 to form his own company. This machine was known as much for its horseshoe-shaped designas it was for being the first super to make vector processing practical. 85 were shipped at a cost of $5 million each.
• 1976 - the Data Encryption Standard was selected as an official Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) for the United States
• 1981 - Richard Feynman proposed quantum computers. The main application he had in mind was the simulation of quantum systems, but he also mentioned the possibility of solving other problems.
• 1986 In the wake of an increasing number of break-ins to government and corporate computers, United States Congress passes the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which makes it a crime to break into computer systems. The law, however, does not cover juveniles.
• 1988 - First optical chip developed, it uses light instead of electricity to increase processing speed.
• 1989 - Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau built the prototype system which became the World Wide Web at CERN
• 1991 - Phil Zimmermann releases the public key encryption program PGP along with its source code, which quickly appears on the Internet.
• 1992 - Release of the movie "Sneakers", in which security experts are blackmailed into stealing a universal decoder for encryption systems.
• 1994 - Peter Shor devises an algorithm which lets quantum computers determine the factorization of large integers quickly. This is the first interesting problem for which quantum computers promise a significant speed-up, and it therefore generates a lot of interest in quantum computers.
• 1994 - DNA computing proof of concept on toy travelling salesman problem; a method for input/output still to be determined.
• 1994 - Russian crackers siphon $10 million from Citibank and transfer the money to bank accounts around the world. Vladimir Levin, the 30-year-old ringleader, uses his work laptop after hours to transfer the funds to accounts in Finland and Israel. Levin stands trial in the United States and is sentenced to three years in prison. Authorities recover all but $400,000 of the stolen money.
• May 11, 1997 - IBM's Deep Blue became the first computer to beat a reigning World Chess Champion, Garry Kasparov, in a full chess match. The computer had played him previously — losing 5/6 games in February 1996.
• January 14, 2000 - US Government announce restrictions on exporting cryptography are relaxed (although not removed). This allows many US companies to stop the long running, and rather ridiculous process of having to create US and international copies of their software.
• March 2000 - President Clinton says he doesn't use e-mail to communicate with his daughter, Chelsea Clinton, at college because he doesn't think the medium is secure.
• September 6, 2000 - RSA Security Inc. released their RSA algorithm into the public domain, in advance of the US patent (#4,405,829) expiring on the 20th Sept. of the same year. Following the relaxation of the US government restrictions earlier in the year (Jan. 14) this removed one of the last barriers to the world-wide distribution of much software based on cryptographic systems. It should be noted that the IDEA algorithm is still under patent and also that government restrictions still apply in some places.
• November 2001 - Microsoft and its allies vow to end "full disclosure" of security vulnerabilities by replacing it with "responsible" disclosure guidelines.