The study of secure communications systems that enable only the sender and intended recipient of a message to read its contents is known as cryptography. The term “Kryptos” comes from Greek which means “hidden”. In addition, cryptography includes techniques such as microdots and merging to obfuscate information in photographs.
The most common use of cryptography in electronic data transit is the encryption and decryption of email and other plain-text messages. The symmetric or “secret key” approach is the most basic way. A secret key is used to encrypt data, and the encoded message and secret key are then transmitted to the recipient for decoding.
The following are some characteristics of cryptography:
- Confidentiality
- Integrity
- Non-repudiation
- Authentication
Cryptography may be classified into three types:
- Secret Key Cryptography
- Public Key Cryptography
- Hash Functions
