Cryptography Cryptography is a branch of mathematics that deals with securing information as well as authentication and restriction of access to a computer

system. The implementation is done using the mathematical methods (taking advantage, for example, of the factorization difficulty of large numbers), as well as quantum encryption methods. Cryptology is regarded as a true science of very little time. This includes both cryptography - secret writing - and cryptanalysis. Encryption is divided into two main categories: symmetric and asymmetric encryption. Before modern times, cryptography dealt only with ensuring the confidentiality of messages (encryption) - conversion of messages from a comprehensible form into an incomprehensible one, and the reverse of this process, to make the message impossible to understand for those who intercept the message and have no additional secret knowledge (ie. the key needed to decrypt the message). In recent decades, the field has expanded beyond issues of confidentiality and includes, among others, message integrity checking techniques, authentication of sender and receiver, electronic signature, secure calculations. Cryptography, used in a security protocol, aims to provide the following fundamental goals for information security: confidentiality, data integrity, authenticity and nonrepudiation. 2.1.1 Symmetric Cryptography Symmetric key cryptography refers to encryption methods in which both sender and receiver use the same key (or, rarely, the keys are different but in a relationship that makes them easily computable one from the other). This type of encryption was the only type known widely until 1976. The fundamental problem of using cryptography in networks is to find ways of secure and periodic distribution of cryptographic keys, requiring that they be changed as often as possible. Usually, a key exchange protocol is used between the correspondents, or public key cryptography. Because the security of the symmetric encryption depends on the cryptographic key protection, administration of these keys is an essential factor and relates to:

Key generation: means of generating (pseudo) random sequence of bytes (or bits)
of the key;

 Distribution of keys, i.e. how the keys are sent and made public to all users with
access rights to encrypted information;

Storing keys, i.e. their secure storage on a magnetic data platform or a card,
usually encrypted under another key encryption keys, called the master key. Symmetric-key encryption algorithms (the most popular include: Twofish, Serpent, AES (Rijndael), Blowfish, CAST5, RC4, TDES, IDEA) can be divided into two categories: block ciphers and stream ciphers. The most famous symmetric block cipher, DES (Data Encryption Standard) has already seen over 20 years of use. It is the first dedicated cryptographic protection standard for computer data. Technological advances have imposed DES's replacement, which has become vulnerable. It was recently demonstrated that, using a complex parallel machine, you can find in about 60 hours, a 56-bit key that was used to encrypt a block of clear text. For this reason, in the year 2000, the U.S. governmental organization NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) has selected the algorithm Rijndael (AES), developed by two Belgian cryptographers, Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, to be the new standard in symmetric cryptography. Asymmetric cryptography or public key cryptography, is a type of cryptography in which the user has a pair of keys, one public and one private, mutually dependent, but almost impossible to calculate one of them if the other is known. Thus, one key can be published and stored in the public domain and the other is a private key, known only by the owner and kept secret. Using the public key a message can be encrypted but can only be decrypted by using the key pair, which is private. A very appropriate analogy for the process is using the mailbox. Anyone can put someone's mailbox an envelope, but access to the envelope is limited to only the owner of the mailbox key. If the message was encrypted with the private key, anyone can decrypt it using the public key. This is called digital signature because the recipient of the message is known (having possession of the secret key to generate the message), and it can proved that the message is unchanged. An analogy for digital signatures would be sealing an envelope using a personal seal. The envelope can be opened by anyone, but the personal seal is the token that verifies the authenticity of the envelope. Mathematically, the two keys are related, but basically you cannot derive one from the other. The obvious advantage is that the secret key is known only by a single entity, and should never be sent, making it almost impossible to attack successfully, if used correctly.