Old School Crypto

Cryptography is awesome, but modern cryptography has a seriously high barrier to entry that prevents a lot of people from getting into its technical side. Fortunately, many important lessons, attacks, and concepts can be demonstrated using classic pre-digital ciphers. Over the course of this four-hour workshop attendees will: * Learn the technical basics of cryptography. * Implement classic ciphers by hand. * Learn about weaknesses in these ciphers and how to leverage these weaknesses to crack said ciphers. * Get examples (in Python) from my Open Source framework to automate standard cryptographic functions, including attacks and analysis. * Learn the history and stories surrounding my chosen ciphers. * Learn a methodology so that when given an unknown ciphertext, they will be able to diagnose the cipher used and implement an attack.

Ultimately we're aiming to have the workshop be 50% technical instruction, 40% hands-on work with guidance, and 10% historical narratives.