An Introduction to Cryptography and Digital Signatures
Cryptography The Greek words “krypt ´os” standing for “hidden” and the word “l ´ogos” that means “word”, are in essence the base from where the word cryptology was derived. As these words denote, cryptology can be best explained by the meaning “hidden word”. In this context, the original purpose behind cryptology is hiding the meaning of some specific combination of words which in turn would insure secrecy and confidentiality. This is a very limited viewpoint in today’s perspective and a wide range of security applications and issues now come under the term of cryptology (rest of the portion of this section will clarify this point of view). As field of mathematical science, Cryptology includes the study of both cryptanalysis as well as cryptography. On one hand, cryptography is a very broad term and represents any process used for data protection. On the other hand, the study of security related issues Continue reading