What is Cryptography?

• ‘Cryptography is about communication in the

presence of adversaries.” –Ron Rivest

• Cryptography is derived from Greek word

kryptos ‘hidden’ and the verb grapho ‘write’,
meaning secret writing.

• Primary purpose is to hide the meaning of

message rather than its existence.
 Network Security
• Network security is the process of preventing
and detecting unauthorized use of
networked computers.

• Security problems can be divided roughly

into four areas:-
• Confidentiality.
• Authentication.
• Non Repudiation.
• Integrity control.
 Basic Terminology
• Encryption- It is the process of converting
plaintext into something unintelligible.

• Decryption- This means to descramble the

encrypted data.

• Plaintext- The original message, before being

transformed, is called plaintext.

• Ciphertext- Transformed plaintext.

• Cipher- Pair of algorithms which perform encryption
and decryption.
• Key- A key is a secret parameter (known only
to the communicants) for the cipher algorithms.
• Alice- Person who needs to send secure
data.  
• Bob- Recipient of the data.
                               
• Eve - Person who interferes with data transfer.
Types Of Cryptography
Symmetric-key
Cryptography
 Secret-key method
• The same key is used by the sender and the receiver.
The key is shared.

• Decryption is inverse of Encryption.

• Substitution and transposition ciphers.

• DES (Data Encryption Standard) is a cipher designed

by IBM that can encrypt 64-bit plaintext using a 56-bit
key.

• TDES is used instead as it has key length of 168-bits.

• Advantage:
Takes less time to encrypt messages, so often
used for long messages.

• Disadvantages:
For N people there has to be N(N-1)/2 keys.
Their distribution can be difficult between
parties.
Also the secret key may or may not be
exchanged securely.
 Public-Key Cryptography
• In this algorithm, there are two keys: a private
key and a public key.

• It is asymmetric involving the use of two

separate keys.

• RSA (named after MIT mathematicians

Rivest, Shamir and Adleman) is the most
common implementation of public-key
cryptography.
• Advantages:
Firstly, it removes the restriction of a shared
symmetric-key between two entities. Secondly,
number of keys needed is reduced
tremendously.

• Disadvantage:
Due to complexity of the algorithm it is not
recommended for large amounts of text.
 References
 
• Data Communications and Networking –
Forouzan
• Computer Networks – Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Web-Sites
• http://www.youdzone.com/signature.html
• http://Cam.qubit.org/articles/crypto/publicke
y.php
• www.electronicsforu.com
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/cc784450.aspx
• http://fas.org/irp/world/india/mod/jcb.htm