Some Historical Aspects of Classical Ciphers

Classical ciphers can often be broken using some statistical information about the plaintext, that means the frequency analysis. After the discovery of frequency analysis, perhaps by the Arab mathematician Al-Kindi in the 9th century, most of these ciphers became breakable, until the development of the polyalphabetic ciphers. These ciphers was done most possible by Leon Battista Alberti around the year 1467. The polyalphabetic ciphers used different ciphers for various parts of a message. The most famous polyalphabetic ciphers is the Vigenère cipher. In this paper we present some connections of these ciphers with the people's destinies: when they were used in diplomacy and how influenced the history in some parts of Europe.