Cryptography involves encrypting information to ensure confidentiality, integrity, authentication and non-repudiation. The document discusses the history of cryptography from ancient methods like the Spartan Scytale to modern techniques like the RSA algorithm. It outlines ciphers like the Caesar cipher and Vigenere cipher, explaining how they work and can be broken through frequency analysis and determining the keyword length. The origins and workings of public key cryptography using prime number factorization with RSA is presented. Current cryptography is discussed with examples of its applications and the ongoing need to increase key lengths due to brute force attacks.