Cryptography is the art of secret writing. Cryptography is basically a technique which is used to enforce security standards on the data which we want to send through any network. When the data is going from source to destination then there may arise a case where some body can misuse the data, that data may also contain some important information which is not meant for anybody other than the receiver, so in these cases security becomes a must. At the sender side, the data is encrypted by using a key, and on the receiver side the encrypted data is again decrypted using another key to get back the original data. Note that the keys are kept secret. This concept of encrypting the data at the sender side and decrypting it at the receiver is Cryptography, which can provide security to the data.
To implement Cryptography, we can use various methods like symmetric key methods, asymmetric key methods, public key methods etc. In the symmetric key method, the key at the sender side is same as that at the receiver side. For example in substitution method, every letter is replaced by another letter, a can be replaced by d, f can be replaced by m etc. all this is done by the using a key, and on the receiver side the same key is used to get back the original data. Other methods like Caesar cipher, transposition can also be used to enforce security to the data.
The effectiveness of a Cryptography technique depends upon the fact that how much time does it takes to try all possible combinations and break the security. The more time it takes, the better is the Cryptography technique. Trying all the possible combinations to break the security is known as brute force attack. To ensure better security you can use the techniques like DES (Data Encryption Standards) in which a 56 bit key is used which is quite hard to break. After its development in the year 1970, this method ran successfully for 20 years after which it was cracked.
Now a days, AES (Advanced Encryption Standards) is used in United States which is also approved by NSA (National Security Agency) and is very difficult to crack. So, the key here is that if you want to send some very private data, then you must choose a cryptography technique which takes a lot of time to crack.
by Camila 1 year ago
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