What is encryption?
Encryption is the coding of information to make it unreadable to those who are not intended to view it. In the past encryption was very different than it is today.
In ancient times, written text had its own built in encryption, not everyone could read. Cryptology became more widespread with the growing education levels of society, but it still continued to be used mostly by highly secretive organizations or people.
The World Wars at the beginning half of the twentieth century created a need for better encryption, and as a result new methods had to be developed. Also into the current information age, vital data is transmitted so much more frequently, creating a need to limit access by those with malicious intent.
>Technical Terminology
Often the terms cipher and code are used interchangebly when talking about encryption, but they are actually very different ways of encoding information.
Cipher
A cipher takes individual letters of a word and change them in to something else. If you took the word "dog" and moved every letter down one position on the alphabet to "eph", then that would be using a simple cipher.
Coding
Where as ciphering takes individual letters and changes them, coding takes the entire meaning of the word and changes it to something else. If you used the word "chicken" as a representation of the word "dog" then that would be using code. Coding has not been utilized much in the history of encryption, because it requires massive decoding books that hold the meanings of each word.
Encoding / Encrypting
The procedure to convert a message into its hidden format.
Decoding / Decrypting
The reverse of the procedure of encoding. This process involves using a key to return the coded message back in to its original readable state.