Mitigating risk with Cryptography
Cryptography dates back to 2000 B.C. which originated by the Egyptians with hieroglyphics, it is means hidden writing. The first known use of cryptography through cipher was by Julius Caesar which he created a system where each character in his messages were replaced by a character three positons ahead of it (techtarget.com) Many countries and organizations have used cryptography over the years to communicate secrete messages during battles and politics.
Today cryptography is used primarily to defend against cybersecurity breaches involving lost or stolen data. It is synonymous with encryption as the process of converting ordinary information, to cipher text makes it unreadable by interceptors or eavesdroppers. A cipher is a pair of algorithms that create the encryption and reversing decryption. (Kapoor et al, 2011)
Cryptography has evolved into cryptographic algorithms and protocols that are grouped into four main areas of symmetric encryption, asymmetric encryption, data integrity algorithms and authentication protocols. All of these area contribute to a broad range of applications, network and internet security that heavily depend on cryptographic techniques for data security. Network and internet security applies cryptographic algorithms to address confidentiality concerns as well as to maintain message integrity, sender/receiver authentication, and digital signatures and secure computation.
What is cryptography and why is it needed?
What are the main areas of cryptographic algorithms and protocols?
How is cryptography used in cybersecurity?
References
Anderson, R. (2008). Security engineering: A guide to building dependable distributed systems. Wiley Publishing.
Callas, J. (2007). The future of Cryptography. Information Systems Security, 16(1), 15–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/10658980601051284
Chamola, V., Jolfaei, A., Chanana, V., Parashari, P., & Hassija, V. (2021). Information security in the Post Quantum era for 5G and beyond networks: Threats to existing cryptography, and post-quantum cryptography. Computer Communications, 176, 99–118. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2021.05.019
Kapoor, B., Pandya, P., & Sherif, J. S. (2011). Cryptography. Kybernetes, 40(9/10), 1422–1439. https://doi.org/10.1108/03684921111169468
Nemati, H. R., & Yang, L. (2011). Applied Cryptography for Cyber Security and defense: Information encryption and cyphering. Information Science Reference.
Richards, K. (2021, September 27). What is cryptography? definition from searchsecurity. SearchSecurity. Retrieved January 20, 2022, from https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/cryptography
Saydjari, O. S. (2018). Engineering trustworthy systems: Get cybersecurity design right the first time. McGraw-Hill Education.
Stallings, W. (2017). Cryptography and network security: Principles and practice. Pearson Prentice Hall.