cryptography principles

Whenever we come across the term cryptography, the first thing and probably the only thing that comes to our mind is private communication through encryption. There is more to cryptography than just encryption.

The Basic Principles

1. Encryption

In a simplest form, encryption is to convert the data in some unreadable form. This helps in protecting the privacy while sending the data from sender to receiver. On the receiver side, the data can be decrypted and can be brought back to its original form. The reverse of encryption is called as decryption. The concept of encryption and decryption requires some extra information for encrypting and decrypting the data. This information is known as key. There may be cases when same key can be used for both encryption and decryption while in certain cases, encryption and decryption may require different keys.

2. Authentication

This is another important principle of cryptography. In a layman’s term, authentication ensures that the message was originated from the originator claimed in the message. Now, one may think how to make it possible? Suppose, Alice sends a message to Bob and now Bob wants proof that the message has been indeed sent by Alice. This can be made possible if Alice performs some action on message that Bob knows only Alice can do. Well, this forms the basic fundamental of Authentication.

3. Integrity

Now, one problem that a communication system can face is the loss of integrity of messages being sent from sender to receiver. This means that Cryptography should ensure that the messages that are received by the receiver are not altered anywhere on the communication path. This can be achieved by using the concept of cryptographic hash.

4. Non Repudiation

What happens if Alice sends a message to Bob but denies that she has actually sent the message? Cases like these may happen and cryptography should prevent the originator or sender to act this way. One popular way to achieve this is through the use of digital signatures.

Types of Cryptography

There are three types of cryptography techniques:

• Secret key Cryptography
• Public key cryptography
• Hash Functions

secret key cryptography

public key Cryptography