In a symmetric cipher, both parties must use the same key for encryption and decryption. This means that the encryption key must be shared between the two parties before any messages can be decrypted. Symmetric systems are also known as shared secret systems or private key systems. Symmetric ciphers are significantly faster than asymmetric ciphers, …
Certificate Authority or Certification Authority (CA) is an entity, which is core to many PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) schemes, whose purpose is to issue digital certificates to use by other parties. It exemplifies a trusted third party. Some certification authorities may charge a fee for their service while some other CAs are free. It is …
Rubber Hose Cryptography refers to a file system in which multiple archives are encrypted and hidden on the same disk in a way that makes each archive appear to be the size of the entire disk. Rubber Hose Cryptography is often used to hide illegal or confidential information in an attempt to prevent theft or …
Cryptology has quickly grown from a field only used by government and military agencies to being one that impacts the day to day lives of consumers across the globe. Cryptographic libraries are used by individuals in just about any country in the world when conducting secure online transactions, communicating via secure email or video, and …
MD5 is a message digest algorithm. MD5 takes a variable length input and produces a 128-bit message digest. MD5 was designed by Ron Rivest in 1991. MD5 is officially defined in RFC 1321 – The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm. MD5 Usage MD5 is used in many applications, including GPG, Kerberos, TLS / SSL, Cisco type 5 …
X.509 is an ITU-T (ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector) standard for PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) in cryptography, which, amongst many other things, defines specific formats for PKC (Public Key Certificates) and the algorithm that verifies a given certificate path is valid under a give PKI (called the certification path validation algorithm). X.509 History X.509 began in …
A chosen plaintext attack is an attack where the cryptanalyst is able to define his own plaintext, feed it into the cipher, and analyze the resulting ciphertext. Mounting a chosen plaintext attack requires the cryptanalyst to be able to send data of his choice into the device which is doing the encryption, and it requires …
Sometimes instead of encrypting a file or a set of files, you want to encrypt an entire file system, partition, or disk. One of the chief advantages of this approach is that, once you have entered your encryption key, the encryption becomes transparent to both you and your applications. When you power off your computer, …
The two most common types of encryption algorithm used in modern cryptography are the block and stream ciphers. The block cipher uses a deterministic algorithm that conducts operations on fixed-length groupings of bits, or blocks. By using a transformation specified by a symmetric key, a block cipher is able to encrypt bulk data, and is …
Symmetric Cryptographic Algorithms DES (Data Encryption Standard) is perhaps the most widely used cryptographic algorithm. DES is based upon IBM’s Lucifer algorithm. The NBS (National Bureau of Standards) and the NSA (National Security Agency) adopted DES as a federal standard in 1977. DES is a symmetric cipher with an effective key length of 56 bits. …