Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A key must be selected before using a cipher to encrypt a message. Without knowledge of the key, it should be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to decrypt the resulting ciphertext into readable plaintext. Most modern ciphers can be categorized in several ways:
Another example of a polyalphabetic substitution cipher that is much more difficult to decode is the Vigenère square, an innovative encoding method. With the square, there are 26 different cipher alphabets that are used to encrypt text. Each cipher alphabet is just another rightward Caesar shift of the original alphabet.
This property makes it difficult to find the key from the ciphertext and if a single bit in a key is changed, the calculation of most or all of the bits in the ciphertext will be affected. Confusion increases the ambiguity of ciphertext and it is used by both block and stream ciphers.
Stream ciphers, in contrast to the 'block' type, create an arbitrarily long stream of key material, which is combined with the plaintext bit-by-bit or character-by-character, somewhat like the one-time pad. In a stream cipher, the output stream is created based on a hidden internal state that changes as the cipher operates.
In this usage, the term means "difficult to guess". An encryption algorithm is intended to be unbreakable (in which case it is as strong as it can ever be), but might be breakable (in which case it is as weak as it can ever be) so there is not, in principle, a continuum of strength as the idiom would seem to imply: Algorithm A is stronger than ...
The Zimmermann Telegram (as it was sent from Washington to Mexico) encrypted as ciphertext. KGB ciphertext found in a hollow nickel in Brooklyn in 1953. In cryptography, ciphertext or cyphertext is the result of encryption performed on plaintext using an algorithm, called a cipher. [1]
The Playfair cipher or Playfair square or Wheatstone–Playfair cipher is a manual symmetric encryption technique and was the first ... but considerably more difficult.
In cryptography, a weak key is a key, which, used with a specific cipher, makes the cipher behave in some undesirable way.Weak keys usually represent a very small fraction of the overall keyspace, which usually means that, a cipher key made by random number generation is very unlikely to give rise to a security problem.