ABSTRACT
Since time immemorial, people have found it necessary to send information to others in a secure way, so that even if a message is intercepted by a third party, it can be read only by the intended recipient. This is usually achieved by converting the message into a string of numbers or letters according to some rule that only the sender and recipient know. The process of converting the message into such a string is called “encoding,” and the process by which the recipient converts the received string back to the original message is called “decoding.”
