I. INTRODUCTION The wrong message in the wrong hands can change the course of history. Fast forward to 1945, cryptography was rampant. The Germans used Enigma machines, which made it almost impossible for the Allies to decode their messages, or so they thought. Little did the Germans know that the Allies were able to decode it, revealing their war plans and helping to end the war. The Allies dubbed any intelligence involving Germans “Ultra.” Using Ultra, the Allies were able to find German naval and land positions and destroy land installations when the enemy least expected it. While the physical device was almost unbreakable, a leak in 1931 when the German Ministry of Defense provided the French with manuals for the Enigma machine led to their downfall [1]. Using the manual, the Allies created a replica, allowing any code to be read. Thinking about it, we can learn how easy it is to screw up a theoretically perfect figure due to human error. The word cryptography comes from the Greek word kryptos, which means hidden. The idea behind the cryptograph is to allow two people to communicate secretly without others reading or modifying the message. Even if an outsider somehow intercepts this message, they will not be able to translate it into a readable form, thus ending any information leak. Early codes involved numbers (keys) that simply moved the alphabet over a few letters of a set quantity that the sender and recipient both knew. Although this type of encryption can be easily cracked today, we have many advanced methods to protect our information flows. Cybersecurity is a vast field of computer science that will only grow as humans invent more and more complex coding methods.II. FUNDAMENTALSThree main ideas exist in cryptography...... middle of paper ...... to authenticate who sent the message using a digital certificate. When the sender transmits the information to the recipient, the recipient also includes a signature (digital certificate) encrypted with their public key. Once the recipient receives the encoded digital certificate, the sender's public key is used to verify whether the sender is really the one they identify themselves as [11].IV. PROMISE AND LIMITSCybersecurity is an important part of our growing world. More than ever, business is conducted via the Internet. It is therefore important to protect our information because it is currently a commodity. The need for cryptography will never diminish. There is always data that needs to be encrypted and in our lifetime this will become faster and easier. As advances are made in the field of mathematics, new algorithms are formed from these discoveries..