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

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