Cryptography - to the point

Of course! Cryptography is a very technical subject; it's difficult to understand the "how"

But there ubiquitous presence warrants to understand the "why & when"

Surprisingly, these questions aren't difficult to understand, so let's run through them quickly.

Some terms

• Encryption and signing make use of keys
• Private keys: are keys that are treated as secret and are usually used by a single entity
• Public keys: are keys that are shared and available for anyone to use
• Symmetric keys: where encryption and decryption is done using the same key
• Asymmetric keys: where encryption and decryption is done using the separate keys belonging to a key-pair
• Hashing makes use of a hashing function
• Encoding (which is not cryptography) is merely changing how the data is represented e.g. ASCII, UTF-8, base64, base62, HEX etc.

Encryption, Signature & Hash

Encryption

Encrypt some data called X:
[X] --(public key)--> [Y]

Decrypt Y to obtain the data:
[Y] --(private key)--> [X]

To contunue reading, click https://mannharleen.github.io/2020-03-13-cryptography/