August 25th Meeting – Cryptography

An estimation of close to 30 students arriving at the Encrypted club meeting today, we immediately dived into one of the common topics that we work with during many of the competitions that we have competed in. Our Chief Technical Officer, Emiliano Guzman began to introduce Cryptography to many of the new students of the club and giving a nice refresher to returning members.

Guzman started off by introducing Ceasar Cipher and teaching the members to use the Ceasar cipher wheel and be able to decode a message. In many of our rounds, we use online tools to be able to decode the messages much faster and accurately, however knowing how to use the wheel will definitely be a good way to understand how the cipher works. We then moved on to using Code.org which helps us practice how to encrypt and decrypt many messages using different ciphers.

After practicing, we were then introduced to different ciphers that would also be used in competitions such as ROT 13 and Base 64. Not only that but we were also introduced to MD5 hashes which helps us see if there were any changes or modifications made to a file such as a document or an image. By using an online tool, we were able to compare two hashes of two images of what it looks like to be the same cat doing the same pose and in the same setting. With that, we were able to see that these images were in fact different.

To end the meeting, Guzman also demonstrated how having knowledge of the python language can also be beneficial to the club by making scripts. We were able to conclude the meeting with new knowledge about topics we would be seeing and a new understanding of how ciphers work.