Overview

Cryptography conceals data against unauthorized access. It tries to prevent malicious actors from trying to block, intercept, modify, or fabricate a message between two entities.

Cryptography can include the following:

Definitions

Cryptosystem

A cryptosystem is a system for encryption and decryption. It utilizes a cryptographic algorithm, a set of all possible plaintexts and a set of all possible keys to generate the set of all possible ciphertexts.

Cryptographic Algorithm

Also known as a cipher is an algorithm that takes a key to convert some plaintext into a ciphertext and back.

Plaintext

The data or literal plain-text that we are trying to encrypt.

Key

An ideally unique and random sequence of characters which is used by a cipher to generate a ciphertext.

Ciphertext

The the binary or sometimes readable data that is generated by the cipher.

Reference

  1. Li, Fengjun Various, Lectures University of Kansas 2024
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad

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