cryptography

Webster's Dictionary (GCIDE)

1.The act or art of writing in code or secret characters; also, secret characters, codes or ciphers, or messages written in a secret code. [1913 Webster +PJC]

2.The science which studies methods for encoding messages so that they can be read only by a person who knows the secret information required for decoding, called the key; it includes cryptanalysis, the science of decoding encrypted messages without possessing the proper key, and has several other branches; see for example steganography. [PJC]

Free On-line Dictionary of Computing

<cryptography> The practise and study of encryption and decryption - encoding data so that it can only be decoded by specific individuals. A system for encrypting and decrypting data is a cryptosystem. These usually involve an algorithm for combining the original data ("plaintext") with one or more "keys" - numbers or strings of characters known only to the sender and/or recipient. The resulting output is known as "ciphertext".

The security of a cryptosystem usually depends on the secrecy of (some of) the keys rather than with the supposed secrecy of the algorithm. A strong cryptosystem has a large range of possible keys so that it is not possible to just try all possible keys (a "brute force" approach). A strong cryptosystem will produce ciphertext which appears random to all standard statistical tests. A strong cryptosystem will resist all known previous methods for breaking codes ("cryptanalysis").

See also cryptology, public-key encryption, RSA.

Usenet newsgroups: news:sci.crypt, news:sci.crypt.research.

FAQ MIT (ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/cryptography-faq/).

Cryptography glossary (http://io.com/~ritter/GLOSSARY.HTM#BruteForceAttack).

RSA cryptography glossary (http://rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/faq/glossary.html).

Cryptography, PGP, and Your Privacy (http://draco.centerline.com:8080/~franl/crypto.html).

(2000-01-16)