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Encryption Keys
Encryption Keys
introduce:
plaintext information that can be directly read by humans
or a machine (this article is an example of plaintext).
Plaintext is a historic term pre-dating computers, when
encryption was only used for hardcopy text, nowadays it is
associated with many formats including music, movies and
computer programs
ciphertext the encrypted data
a cipher the mathematics (or algorithm) responsible for
turning plaintext into ciphertext and reverting ciphertext to
plaintext. (You might also see the word code used. There is
a technical difference between the two but it need not
concern us now.)
encryption the process of converting plaintext to
ciphertext (occasionally you may see it called
encipherment)
decryption the process of reverting ciphertext to plaintext
(occasionally decipherment).
Encryption keys
It might surprise you to know that almost all ciphers are published
in the scientific press or in standards documents, having them
available for widespread scrutiny allows many people to check
that they are secure and do not contain weaknesses which could
be exploited to compromise the security of the data encrypted
using that cipher.
A computer encryption key is nothing more than a string of bits
where each bit can have a value of either 0 or 1. The number of
possible values for a key is simply the total number of values that
the key can have. So our one-bit long key can only have two
possible values 0 and 1. If we chose to have a two-bit key it
could have one of four possible values 00, 01, 10 and 11. In fact
every time we increase the length of the key by one bit we double
the number of possible keys so a three-bit key has eight
possible values 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110 and 111.
The total number of keys can be written in scientific form as 2 key length;
so a key with a length of eight has 28 that is 256 values.
But how long should a key be? How short is too short?
The problem with short keys