A mind map of cryptography: classical ciphers and codebreaking; the wartime and NSA eras; Shannon and the theoretical foundations; the public-key revolution; modern primitives and protocols; advanced constructions (zero-knowledge, homomorphic, multi-party computation); and the post-quantum transition. Named cryptographers, algorithms, papers, and protocols with dates across six branches.
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Classical & Wartime Shannon & the NSA Era Public-Key Revolution Modern Primitives & Protocols Advanced Constructions Post-Quantum & the Privacy Frontier Ancient and classical ciphers Mechanical cipher machines Polish Cipher Bureau Bletchley Park American wartime cryptography Shannon's theoretical foundation NSA founding and cryptologic hegemony The DES episode Public-key's secret prehistory (GCHQ) Diffie-Hellman-Merkle RSA and factoring Elliptic-curve cryptography The crypto wars Theoretical foundations of modern crypto Block ciphers and AES Hash functions Authenticated encryption and MACs TLS and the web End-to-end messaging Network protocols and anonymity Zero-knowledge proofs Homomorphic encryption Multi-party computation Digital cash and blockchain Side-channel and physical attacks Quantum threat to classical crypto NIST PQC standardization PQC families Differential privacy Confidential computing Governance and open questions Scytale — Spartan transposition cipher, ~500 BCE Caesar cipher — Julius Caesar, Suetonius records ~58 BCE Al-Kindi — frequency analysis, Baghdad ~850 CE Leon Battista Alberti — polyalphabetic cipher disk, 1467 Vigenère cipher — described by Bellaso 1553, attributed to Vigenère 1586 Kasiski — cryptanalysis of Vigenère, 1863 Kerckhoffs — Kerckhoffs's principle, 1883 ("system must not require secrecy") Thomas Jefferson — wheel cypher, 1790s (rediscovered 1922) Hebern rotor machine — 1917 US patent Arthur Scherbius — Enigma patent, 1918 Boris Hagelin — M-209, adopted US Army 1943 Lorenz SZ42 — German teleprinter cipher Japanese Purple (Type 97) cipher machine Marian Rejewski — first mathematical attack on Enigma, 1932 Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski — Zygalski sheets and grill method Polish breakthrough shared with French and British, Jul 1939 Rejewski's contribution systematically understated in English histories Bletchley Park acquired by Government Code and Cypher School, 1938 Alan Turing — Bombe design, 1940 (with Gordon Welchman) Bill Tutte — breaks Lorenz SZ42 structure, 1941 Tommy Flowers — Colossus electronic computer, Post Office Research, 1943 Colossus Mark II operational by Jun 1944 — aids D-Day intelligence Joan Clarke — cryptanalyst, Hut 8 deputy head Ultra intelligence — kept classified until 1974 William F. Friedman — Signal Intelligence Service, 1930s Elizebeth Friedman — US Coast Guard cryptography Agnes Meyer Driscoll — Japanese naval codes Navajo code talkers — Pacific theater, 1942–1945 Army Security Agency → NSA, 1952 Shannon — A Mathematical Theory of Communication, Bell System Tech J. 1948 Shannon — Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems, BSTJ 1949 Perfect secrecy (one-time pad) — unconditional security definition Confusion and diffusion — the two design principles Unicity distance — when a cipher becomes uniquely decipherable National Security Agency created by executive order, Oct 24 1952 Venona Project — decryption of Soviet intelligence, 1943–1980 NSA-GCHQ UKUSA Agreement, 1946 — Five Eyes precursor Invention secrecy and classification — cryptography leaves military use reluctantly TEMPEST — electromagnetic emanations monitoring, declassified gradually IBM Lucifer cipher — Horst Feistel, 1970s NBS call for encryption standard, 1973 DES adopted as FIPS 46, 1977 (56-bit key, Feistel structure) NSA modified S-boxes — decades later shown to defend against differential cryptanalysis Biham & Shamir rediscover differential cryptanalysis, 1990 EFF Deep Crack brute-forces DES, Jul 1998 (~$250K hardware) Triple-DES as bridge; AES process begins 1997 James Ellis — concept of non-secret encryption, GCHQ 1970 Clifford Cocks — RSA-equivalent algorithm, GCHQ 1973 Malcolm Williamson — Diffie-Hellman-equivalent key exchange, GCHQ 1974 UK government declassifies, 1997 — all three get posthumous/late credit Ralph Merkle — Secure Communications Over Insecure Channels, Berkeley 1974 Whitfield Diffie & Martin Hellman — New Directions in Cryptography, IEEE IT 1976 Diffie-Hellman key exchange — discrete logarithm hardness Merkle puzzles — constructive public-key idea, pre-Diffie-Hellman Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, Leonard Adleman — A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures, CACM 1978 RSA — factoring hardness, trapdoor permutation RSA Security Inc. founded, 1982 RSA patent expires, Sep 2000 — open-source crypto explodes Rabin cryptosystem — Michael Rabin, 1979 (factoring-equivalent security) Neal Koblitz — Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems, Math. Comp. 1987 Victor Miller — Use of Elliptic Curves in Cryptography, CRYPTO 1985 ECC offers equivalent security at much smaller key sizes Curve25519 — Daniel J. Bernstein, 2005 NIST P-256, P-384 curves — suspicion of potential NSA backdoor Phil Zimmermann releases PGP, 1991 US criminal investigation of Zimmermann, 1993–1996 Clipper Chip proposal — NSA-escrowed encryption, 1993 (collapsed 1996) Matt Blaze — Clipper Chip flaw, 1994 ITAR munitions classification of strong crypto — lifted Jan 2000 Daniel J. Bernstein lawsuit — Bernstein v. United States, 1995–1999 Cypherpunks mailing list — Tim May, Eric Hughes, John Gilmore, 1992 A Cypherpunk's Manifesto — Hughes, 1993 Goldwasser & Micali — probabilistic encryption, 1984 Goldwasser, Micali, Rackoff — zero-knowledge proofs, 1985 IND-CPA, IND-CCA — indistinguishability security games Random oracle model — Bellare & Rogaway, 1993 Game-based proofs (Shoup) and simulation-based proofs (Canetti) Joan Daemen & Vincent Rijmen — Rijndael, 1998 AES selected by NIST as FIPS 197, Nov 2001 128/192/256-bit keys, substitution-permutation network AES-NI Intel hardware instructions, 2010 ChaCha20 stream cipher — Bernstein, 2008 MD5 — Rivest, 1992; broken by Wang 2004 SHA-1 — NSA, 1995; first collision (Google SHAttered), Feb 2017 SHA-2 family (SHA-256, SHA-512) — NSA, 2001 NIST SHA-3 competition, 2007–2012 Keccak — Bertoni, Daemen, Peeters, Van Assche; SHA-3 winner, 2012 BLAKE3 — Merkle-tree-based, 2020 Xiaoyun Wang — collision attacks on MD5/SHA-0/SHA-1, 2004–2005 HMAC — Bellare, Canetti, Krawczyk, 1996 Poly1305 MAC — Bernstein, 2005 GCM (Galois/Counter Mode) — McGrew & Viega, 2005 AEAD (authenticated encryption with associated data) SSL 2.0 — Netscape, 1995 TLS 1.0 — IETF RFC 2246, 1999 TLS 1.2 — RFC 5246, 2008 TLS 1.3 — RFC 8446, Aug 2018 (handshake reduced to 1-RTT) HTTPS Everywhere, HSTS, certificate transparency Let's Encrypt launches, Apr 2016 — free CA drives HTTPS to majority ACME protocol for automated certificate issuance Off-the-Record (OTR) — Borisov, Goldberg, Brewer, 2004 Signal Protocol — Double Ratchet, Moxie Marlinspike & Trevor Perrin, 2013 WhatsApp adopts Signal Protocol, 2016 Noise Protocol Framework — Perrin, 2018 MLS (Messaging Layer Security) — IETF, 2023 IPsec — IETF, 1995 SSH — Tatu Ylönen, 1995 Tor (onion routing) — Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, Paul Syverson, 2002 WireGuard — Jason A. Donenfeld, 2015 Mixnets — Chaum, 1981 (revived in Nym, Katzenpost) Goldwasser, Micali, Rackoff — ZK proofs, 1985 Fiat-Shamir transform — 1986 (non-interactive ZK) zk-SNARKs — Groth16, 2016 Bulletproofs — Bünz et al., 2018 PLONK — Gabizon, Williamson, Ciobotaru, 2019 (universal setup) zk-STARKs — Ben-Sasson et al., 2018 (no trusted setup, post-quantum) zkEVM — Ethereum execution proofs, 2023 Craig Gentry — first fully homomorphic scheme, Stanford PhD 2009 BFV scheme — Brakerski-Fan-Vercauteren CKKS — Cheon-Kim-Kim-Song, approximate HE, 2017 TFHE — Chillotti et al., 2016 (bootstrapping every gate) Microsoft SEAL, IBM HElib, Zama concrete — open-source libraries Bootstrapping still the dominant cost — ~ms per gate in 2025 Andrew Yao — Yao's Millionaires' Problem, 1982; garbled circuits, 1986 GMW — Goldreich, Micali, Wigderson, 1987 BGW — Ben-Or, Goldwasser, Wigderson, 1988 (information-theoretic) SPDZ — Damgård et al., 2012 (preprocessing-friendly) Threshold ECDSA, BLS signatures — distributed signing David Chaum — ecash / blind signatures, 1982 Adam Back — Hashcash proof-of-work, 1997 Wei Dai — b-money proposal, 1998 Nick Szabo — bit gold proposal, 1998 Satoshi Nakamoto — Bitcoin whitepaper, Oct 31 2008 Bitcoin genesis block, Jan 3 2009 Ethereum — Vitalik Buterin whitepaper 2013, launched Jul 2015 Proof-of-Stake — Ethereum Merge, Sep 2022 Paul Kocher — Timing attacks, CRYPTO 1996 Kocher et al. — Differential Power Analysis, CRYPTO 1999 Spectre and Meltdown — speculative execution, Jan 2018 Rowhammer — DRAM bit flipping, Kim et al. 2014 Cold boot attacks — Halderman et al., 2008 Constant-time programming as defensive discipline Peter Shor — factoring algorithm, FOCS 1994 Shor's algorithm breaks RSA and DH in polynomial time on a quantum computer Grover's algorithm — quadratic speedup for symmetric key search, 1996 "Harvest now, decrypt later" — nation-state adversaries record ciphertexts NIST call for post-quantum proposals, Dec 2016 Round 1: 69 submissions, Dec 2017 Round 3 finalists announced, 2020 CRYSTALS-Kyber (ML-KEM) — FIPS 203, Aug 2024 (lattice KEM) CRYSTALS-Dilithium (ML-DSA) — FIPS 204, Aug 2024 SPHINCS+ (SLH-DSA) — FIPS 205, Aug 2024 (hash-based) Falcon selected but standard later — lattice signatures SIDH broken by Castryck-Decru, Jul 2022 Lattice-based — LWE, Ring-LWE, Module-LWE hardness Hash-based — Merkle trees (XMSS, LMS, SPHINCS+) Code-based — McEliece, 1978 (still unbroken); Classic McEliece Isogeny-based — CSIDH (SIKE broken); still research-active Multivariate — mostly broken; Rainbow and HFE variants Cynthia Dwork, Frank McSherry, Kobbi Nissim, Adam Smith — Calibrating Noise, 2006 ε-differential privacy — formal privacy definition Apple adopts DP for iOS telemetry, 2016 US Census Bureau DP deployment, 2020 Local vs. central differential privacy — Google RAPPOR 2014 Intel SGX — software guard extensions, 2015 AMD SEV / SEV-SNP — secure encrypted virtualization Arm TrustZone — long-standing TEE Intel TDX — trust domain extensions, 2023 Apple Private Cloud Compute, 2024 Side-channel attacks against SGX continue to erode trust model Dual_EC_DRBG NSA backdoor suspicion, exposed 2013 Snowden leak Snowden disclosures, Jun 2013 — PRISM, BULLRUN, EDGEHILL Wassenaar Arrangement — export controls on cryptographic software EU GDPR, 2018 — data protection by design and default Nakamoto identity — still unverified as of 2025 PQ migration timeline — NSA CNSA 2.0 mandates PQC by 2033 Cryptography: Ciphers, Primitives, and Post-Quantum Brian Tighe · Mind Maps Orbital mind map. Scroll to zoom, drag to pan, or use the buttons above (+ / − / 0 keys also work). Hover a node to highlight its path to the center and the subtree beneath it. How to read this The center holds the topic. The six branches fan out bilaterally — three on each side — each in its own color. Sub-branches nest three levels deep under each top-level branch. Hover a leaf to trace the path back to the center; hover a branch to see everything it contains.
This is the shape the topic has when you try to hold the whole field in your head at once. It is not an argument; it is a scaffold. The essays argue against or within scaffolds like this one.