Cryptography signifies that which is concealed or hidden. It is writing or a description in a brief manner that secretly conveys a particular intelligence or words that we may wish to communicate. Cryptography may be used as a form of clandestine communication. The art of cryptography is a legitimate form of communication that is acknowledged in the world. This is because there can be some times of danger and stress between individuals or nations that will make the use of cryptography inevitable especially when there is need to carry out a successful operation, by ensuring that the enemy does not get to understand the deliberations or communications between various agents of government.
Cryptography is the study of mathematical techniques for different dimensions of security. The other words that are closely related to cryptography are cryptanalysis and cryptology. Cryptanalysis is the science that is applied in defeating the mathematical techniques while cryptology is the study of both cryptography and cryptanalysis. The terminologies that are applied in cryptography include:
- Encryption: this is the action of concealing or disguising a message with an intention of hiding the information content. This may be achieved through encoding or enciphering.
- Protocol: this is an algorithm which can be defined by series of steps and can specify the series to various parties.
- Plain text: this is the message that can be transited or that can be stored whether encoded or decoded.
- Cipher: this is a map from a space of plain text to a space of cipher text.
- Encode: to convert a message into a representation in a particular standard alphabet.
- Decode: to covert the coded message back into its original alphabet.
Keeping Information Private
Secrecy of communication can take many forms just in the same way that the perception regarding the movement the eye can be interpreted to give different meanings. The key features of information that can enhance the security of information are confidentiality, privacy, integrity of data, authentication and non repudiation. Security of message is always addressed by cryptographic standard methods. Any information that is stored on a data base can easily be accessed and shared by the intruders.
Privacy of information is an inherent culture of every individual. The emergence of computer technology and especially communication transmitted through computer networks have raised a lot of ethical concerns regarding privacy due to the volume of information that passes through a computer in one day. Computer privacy raises several ethical and moral dilemmas.
There are several technologies that have been developed to enhance privacy during communication. These technologies include cryptography, authentication and digital signatures. Cryptography, for example, is a technology that can utilize several firms of algorithms and protocols in computer networks. Computers have raised few and new privacy problems mainly resulting from communication and storage of information. The technologies that enhance privacy have raised several concerns among governments and other authorities due to the difficulty of the interception of the encrypted communication that is transmitted through computer networks.