Lightning Talk Series: Cracking the Code: Reimagining the Vigenère Cipher (virtual)

Khoury Sparks: A Lightning Talk Series is an engaging, high-impact 20-minute talk series that connects prospective graduate students with Khoury faculty and current graduate students. Khoury Sparks showcases cutting-edge research, applied projects, and teaching innovations — highlighting how graduate study at Khoury College is exciting, attainable, and deeply connected to the needs of today’s tech industry.

Cracking the Code: Reimagining the Vigenère Cipher

What happens when you apply modern computational power to centuries-old cryptography? This talk will break down the research behind an award-winning project, by graduate student Ruby Lo, that transforms the Vigenère Cipher from a historical relic into a modern, lightweight security tool.

While the original cipher was restricted to only 26 letters, we’ll walk you through how this polyalphabetic substitution re-engineered cipher into a flexible and fully customizable encryption framework, allowing it to secure the complex data strings used by modern connected devices. By prioritizing performance over computational complexity, this research offers a practical solution for resource-constrained devices where standard modern encryption is often too heavy to run.

Join this talk to learn how to take a foundational algorithm and rebuild it for a modern technical landscape.

Questions? Email m.barton@northeastern.edu.