Protecting the data is pivotal here and now. As the emerging trends in technologies are rising there must always be a safeguard for the private data. Cryptography is the study and practice of techniques for securing communication and data in the presence of adversaries.
Cryptography is essentially important because it allows people to securely protect data and doesn’t allow anybody else to have access on to it. It is used to protect corporate secrets and protect personal information to guard against issues like identity theft.
History
Cryptography has been used since ancient times allowing people to transmit information in a secure manner. The development history has led to the advanced methods used today.
The most basic form of cryptography ‘symbol replacement’ appears in both ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian writings. By later periods cryptography was widely used to protect important military information in the Greek city-state of Sparta. Messages were encrypted by writing them on parchment laid over a cylinder of particular size making it indecipherable until it was wrapped around a similar size cylinder by the recipient. A more advanced method invented by Romans known as the Ceaser cipher. Where letters of encrypted messages were shifted by a certain number of places down the Latin alphabet. A major breakthrough was described by Thomas Jefferson in 1795, invention of a cipher wheel consisted of a set of wheels each with alphabets around their edge. The order of the discs acted as the cipher key and the recipient had to arrange the discs in the agreed upon order to decode the message. Similar to the cipher wheel a device called Enigma used by the Axis powers in World War 2 also used rotating discs to encode a message making it virtually impossible to read without another enigma device.
As technologies and computer systems improved cryptography became more advanced than before.
Working of cryptography
A group of readable data is transformed into unidentifiable form using an algorithm, or series of mathematical operations. The messages can only be visible to those recipients it is being sent to. To those who are not authorized to see and access this piece of information, the message being transferred looks like gibberish or what’s technically known as cipher text.
Types of cryptography
Cryptography is classified into three:
- Symmetric-key cryptography.
- Asymmetric-key cryptography.
- Hash functions.
1. Symmetric-key cryptography:
Symmetric key algorithms are algorithms that use the same cryptographic keys for both encryption of plain text and decryption of cipher text. The keys may be identical or there may be some simple transformation to go between the two keys. The keys in practice represent a shared secret between two or more parties that can be used to maintain a private information link.
Both the parties will have access to the secret key.
2. Asymmetric-key cryptography.
Asymmetric-key cryptography is a cryptographic system that uses a pair of keys which are public key and private key. The public key is freely distributed and the paired private key will remain as a secret. The public key is used for encryption of the data while the private key is used for decryption.
3. Hash functions.
Hashing is the process of converting an input of any length into a fixed size string of text using a mathematical function. Any text no matter how long it is can be converted into an array of numbers and letters through an algorithm.
Benefits of cryptography
Confidentiality and integrity: Information being transmitted cannot be deciphered by any intruder. Information being transferred cannot be modified.
Authentication: Both sender and receiver are in a position to confirm the nature of information being shared between the two.
Non-repudiation: Sender communicating using cryptography cannot deny her role and intentions in the transmission of the information later on.
Conclusion
Cryptography is being used in many sectors today such as banking, computing, engineering, and e-commerce. Governments and defense forces also use these methods of cryptography to carry out research activities or projects and secretive operations. Network security is another wide area which uses cryptography.
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