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It took nearly seven centuries for a cryptography breakthrough to sunset the Caesar cipher that was big in the first century BC.

Caesar ciphers simply shifted letters up or down in the alphabet by a fixed number of positions. Starting in the year 800, Arab polymath al-Kindi began working on what’s known as frequency analysis — a type of systematic pattern recognition that would result in reverse-engineering shift cipher encryption, like the Caesar.

By the 16th-century Renaissance, solving Caesar ciphers was so easy that they were considered children’s puzzles.

So it was until two…

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