Cryptography

Cryptography

Abstract

Everyone has secrets; some have more than others. When it becomes necessary to transmit those secrets from one point to another, it’s important to protect the information while it’s in transit. There are many aspects to security and many applications, ranging from secure commerce and payments to private communications and protecting passwords. One essential aspect for secure communications is that of cryptography.
In the past, cryptography is heavily used for military applications to keep sensitive information secret from enemies.
Cryptography presents various methods for taking legible, readable data, and transforming it into unreadable data for the purpose of secure transmission, and then using a key to transform it back into readable data when it reaches its destination. The most secure techniques use a mathematical algorithm and a variable value known as a ‘key’. Cryptography uses a single key to encrypt i.e. changing data so that it is unrecognizable and useless to an unauthorized person and decrypt a message i.e. changing it back to its original form.
There are several ways of classifying cryptographic algorithms Secret Key Cryptography, which uses a single key for both encryption and decryption. Public Key Cryptography, which uses one key for encryption and another for decryption. Hash Functions uses a mathematical transformation to irreversibly “encrypt” information.
The goal of cryptography extends beyond merely making data unreadable; it also extends into user authentication, Privacy/confidentiality, Integrity, Non-repudiation.