Abstract

Information security is a vital aspect of data communication that is of great concern while using computing devices. It is therefore not out of place in introducing cryptography at the early stage of the study of computer security. Many modern cryptographic methods are deeply rooted in mathematical principles and this makes it a little difficult to comprehend by some students who are deficient in mathematics in learning cryptography. An example of a simple and foremost technique used in cryptography is the Caesar cipher substitution method. This method is considered very weak in this modern day of quantum computing whereby the cipher text could be easily be deciphered. However, introducing cryptography principles using the Caesar cipher method would likely spur the interest of learners interested in computer security because of its simplicity. This paper was aimed at providing an easy approach to learning cryptographic principles at the introductory stage using the Caesar cipher encryption technique. An easy to comprehend algorithm was developed and implemented in Python programming language. The result produced the cipher text of the plain text encrypted. Also, a brute force attack was used to decipher the cipher text to expose the weakness of the method. This result would make learners to have an increased interest in modern cryptographic techniques.