Cryptography, The Art of Disguising The Written Word

"Can we hide or encrypt that variable somehow so that it appears as complete gibberish?" That was the question put to me on a Friday afternoon, which started the journey into what is known as Cryptography, the process of converting information into unintelligible goblygook and then taking that text and converting it back into its original form. This paper takes a look at cryptography, introduces monoalphabetic, polyalphabetic and transposition cyphers, and finally introduces key-based cypher that is considered to be the essential element in generating modern cyphertext. Emphasis will be placed on encrypting a single variable within a dataset, rather than a whole dataset as there are tools from SAS and third party software to do this task.