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The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to cryptography: Cryptography (or cryptology) – practice and study of hiding information. Modern cryptography intersects the disciplines of mathematics, computer science, and engineering. Applications of cryptography include ATM cards, computer passwords, and electronic ...
Cryptography, or cryptology (from Ancient Greek: κρυπτός, romanized: kryptós "hidden, secret"; and γράφειν graphein, "to write", or -λογία-logia, "study", respectively [1]), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. [2]
This concept is widely embraced by cryptographers, in contrast to security through obscurity, which is not. Kerckhoffs's principle was phrased by American mathematician Claude Shannon as "the enemy knows the system", [ 1 ] i.e., "one ought to design systems under the assumption that the enemy will immediately gain full familiarity with them".
In the context of cryptography, encryption serves as a mechanism to ensure confidentiality. [1] Since data may be visible on the Internet, sensitive information such as passwords and personal communication may be exposed to potential interceptors. [1] The process of encrypting and decrypting messages involves keys. The two main types of keys in ...
These concepts are also important in the design of cryptographic hash functions, and pseudorandom number generators, where decorrelation of the generated values is the main feature. Diffusion (and its avalanche effect ) is also applicable to non-cryptographic hash functions .
In cryptography, a message authentication code (MAC), sometimes known as an authentication tag, is a short piece of information used for authenticating and integrity-checking a message.
[1] Cryptographic protocols are widely used for secure application-level data transport. A cryptographic protocol usually incorporates at least some of these aspects: Key agreement or establishment; Entity authentication; Symmetric encryption and message authentication material construction; Secured application-level data transport; Non ...
A block cipher consists of two paired algorithms, one for encryption, E, and the other for decryption, D. [1] Both algorithms accept two inputs: an input block of size n bits and a key of size k bits; and both yield an n-bit output block. The decryption algorithm D is defined to be the inverse function of encryption, i.e., D = E −1.