The history of encryption stretches back thousands of years to the time of the Islamic scholars, who first started using simple monoalphabetic encryption ciphers to make messages unreadable. Ciphers became more complex, whilst maintaining the same basic structure until the 1970s.

In World War 2 computers were first used to break ciphers and after the war they were used to create new complex digital ciphers. Messages were still passed through an set of rules to convert the plain message to the cipher-text message and through the same rules in a reverse direction message plain again. This process is now known as symetric encryption.

Then in the 1970s a compleatly new form of encryption was created in which the message was passed through one set of rules (or mathematical function) to encrypt and a different to decrypt. This is now known as public key encryption (PKE) or Non-secret encryption (NSE) and is asymetic encryption.

This report will feature on the history of PKE and NSE, the most popular method for implementing asymetric encryption, the possible future of cryptograhpy as well as discussing the creators of this revolutionary new system as well as the ways it is used, and how it has influenced the connected world we now live in.