Education Tools for Teaching Classical Ciphers

In this work, we focus on supporting online education of courses about Classical Ciphers and promoting historical cryptography to the general public. For this purpose, we designed and developed new modules in 2020 and integrated them into our ongoing HCPortal project. We developed an education module (Angular application) with which we can present a wide range of supporting applications regarding cryptography and cryptanalysis of historical ciphers and visualize their necessary parts. In addition, we also developed a special Virtual museum (using A-Frame technology) to promote public interest in ciphers using modern technologies. These modules have undergone significant change in recent years. They have been expanded with new content, and the structure of the Educational module has also changed. We have included various Chinese and Japanese historical ciphers into these modules due to the lack of availability of resources that specifically address this area of research. We are presenting the new content added to the HCPortal, focusing on these Chinese and Japanese ciphers.