Chemistry and Cybersecurity

In love and war, ciphers have been used to pass secret messages. Now, we typically use strong encryption, but in days gone by, secret messages often used a cipher code. These are typically encoding methods, of translating our letters into another form, or processed using a secret key. A fun encoding cipher uses the periodic table to map letters in plaintext to the number of protons that the element has:

Thus, we have ‘H’ (Hydrogen) mapped to 1, ‘He’ Helium) mapped to 2, and ‘Li’ (Lithium) mapped to 3. In Python, this list can then be defined with a dictionary of [here]:

periodic = {1:'h',2:'he',3:'li',4:'be',5:'b',6:'c',7:'n',8:'o',9:'f',10:'ne',
11:'na',12:'mg',13:'al',14:'si',15:'p',16:'s',17:'cl',18:'ar',19:'k',20:'ca',
21:'sc',22:'ti',23:'v',24:'cr',25:'mn',26:'fe',27:'co',28:'ni',29:'cu',30:'zn',
31:'ga',32:'ge',33:'as',34:'se',35:'br',36:'kr',37:'rb',38:'sr',39:'y',40:'zr',
41:'nb',42:'mo',43:'tc',44:'ru',45:'rh',46:'pd',47:'ag',48:'cd',49:'in',50:'sn',
51:'sb',52:'te',53:'i',54:'xe',55:'cs',56:'ba',71:'lu',72:'hf',73:'ta',74:'w',
75:'re',76:'os',77:'ir',78:'pt',79:'au',80:'hg',81:'tl',82:'pb',83:'bi',
84:'po',85:'at',86:'rn',87:'fr',88:'ra',103:'lr',104:'rf',105:'db',106:'sg'…