Cryptography

Sumit Mehta

MCA 4th Year

International Institute of Professional Studies
Devi Ahilya.Vishava Vidhalaya
Indore

Abstract

The expansions of the connectivity of computers make ways of protecting data and messages from
tampering important. It is thus up to the user to ensure that communications which are expected to remain
private actually do so. One of the techniques for ensuring privacy of files and communications is
Cryptography. Cryptography is the art of creating and using cryptosystems. Cryptosystem is the entire
process of using cryptography. This includes the actions of encrypting and decrypting a file or message, or
authenticating the sender of an e-mail message.

Encryption is the transformation of data into some unreadable form. Its purpose is to ensure privacy by
keeping the information hidden from anyone for whom it is not intended, even those who can see the
encrypted data. That is encryption is any process to convert plaintext into cipher text. Decryption is the
reverse of encryption; it is the transformation of encrypted data back into some intelligible form. That is
decryption is a process to convert cipher text back into plaintext. Encryption and decryption requires the
use of some secret information, usually referred to as a key. Depending on the encryption mechanism used,
the same key might be used for both encryption and decryption, while for other mechanisms, the keys used
for encryption and decryption might be different.
Cryptography is about communication in the presence of adversaries. As an example a classic goal of
cryptography is privacy: two parties wish to communicate privately, so that an adversary knows nothing
about what was communicated. A standard cryptographic solution to the privacy problem is a secret-key
cryptosystem, which consists of the following:

● A message space M: a set of strings (plaintext messages) over some alphabet.

● A ciphertext space C: a set of strings (ciphertexts) over some alphabet.

● A key space K: a set of strings (keys) over some alphabet.

● An encryption algorithm E mapping KxM into C.

● A decryption alogorithm D mapping KxC into M. The algorithms E and D must have the property
that D(K,E(K,M))=M for all K, M.

Today’s cryptography is more than secret writing i.e. more than encryption and decryption. Authentication
is as fundamental a part of our lives as privacy. We use authentication through out our everyday life, for
instance when we sign our name to some document we use authentication. As we move to a world where
our decisions and agreements are communicated electronically, we need to replicate these procedures.
Cryptography provides mechanisms for such procedures. A digital signature binds a document to the
possessor of a particular key, while a digital timestamp binds a document to its creation at a particular
time. But the field of cryptography contains even more when we include some of the things cryptography
enables us to do. With just a few basic tools it is possible to build elaborate schemes and protocols which
allow us to pay using electronic money, to prove we know certain information without revealing the
information itself, and to share a secret quantity in such a way that no fewer than three from a pool of five
people (for instance) can reconstruct the secret.