HOW TO TEACH THE HISTORY OF CRYPTOGRAPHY AND STEGANOGRAPHY

Abstract

Students of the undergraduate course Computer Science get acquainted with the most prevalent methods of Steganography and Cryptography in history as well as with up to date applications. To teach Cryptography and Steganography is complicated, because you need to plot figures and tables at the blackboard plus calculating the frequency of characters in the text is consuming a lot of work and time. Concealing information within pictures or voices is impossible to show on the blackboard and you can only partially explain how to apply the LSB (least significant bit) technique. Therefore, we have devised some applications which are appropriate to show all these algorithms. We wanted to know the usefulness of all the programs we wrote. The safety technology engineering students attended my lectures held at different times in two groups. In the first group of lectures I presented and used the programs described above while the lectures for the second group were delivered without these materials. Our hypothesis was that a group where we used the developed multimedia applications got better marks in the papers written than the other. An analysis of the results (Man-Whitney test) showed significant difference in paper results of the two groups (p<0,05). This showed: the paper results of students attending the multimedia lectures were better by one mark than the results of the other group where lectures were delivered without multimedia presentations. We can say the using of multimedia applications when teaching cryptography and steganography is productive, and the students understand the methods easier, and get better result when writing papers.