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/
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