Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In cryptography, ciphertext or cyphertext is the result of encryption performed on plaintext using an algorithm, called a cipher. [1] Ciphertext is also known as encrypted or encoded information because it contains a form of the original plaintext that is unreadable by a human or computer without the proper cipher to decrypt it.
The ciphertext message contains all the information of the plaintext message, but is not in a format readable by a human or computer without the proper mechanism to decrypt it. The operation of a cipher usually depends on a piece of auxiliary information, called a key (or, in traditional NSA parlance, a cryptovariable ).
Padding a message's payload before encrypting it can help obscure the cleartext's true length, at the cost of increasing the ciphertext's size and introducing or increasing bandwidth overhead. Messages may be padded randomly or deterministically, with each approach having different tradeoffs.
For example, a journalist can publish the public key of an encryption key pair on a web site so that sources can send secret messages to the news organization in ciphertext. Only the journalist who knows the corresponding private key can decrypt the ciphertexts to obtain the sources' messages—an eavesdropper reading email on its way to the ...
Ciphertext stealing is a technique for encrypting plaintext using a block cipher, without padding the message to a multiple of the block size, so the ciphertext is the same size as the plaintext. It does this by altering processing of the last two blocks of the message.
Partially solved (all 4 ciphertexts solved between 1985 and 1986, but the solution to the 4th ciphertext has since been lost) [2] 1987 Decipher III: Unsolved [2] 1990 Kryptos: Partially solved (3 out of the 4 ciphertexts solved between 1992 and 1999) 1991 Scorpion ciphers [3] Unsolved 1999 Ricky McCormick's encrypted notes: Unsolved 2006
Get AOL Mail for FREE! Manage your email like never before with travel, photo & document views. Personalize your inbox with themes & tabs. You've Got Mail!
An autokey cipher (also known as the autoclave cipher) is a cipher that incorporates the message (the plaintext) into the key. The key is generated from the message in some automated fashion, sometimes by selecting certain letters from the text or, more commonly, by adding a short primer key to the front of the message.