CRYPTOGRAPHY

Introduction

Course Handout

Syllabus

Introduction:

The art of cryptography is considered to be born along with the art of writing. As civilizations evolved, human beings got organized in tribes, groups, and kingdoms. This led to the emergence of ideas such as power, battles, supremacy, and politics. These ideas further fueled the natural need of people to communicate secretly with selective recipient which in turn ensured the continuous evolution of cryptography as well.

Cryptography is the art and science of making a cryptosystem that is capable of providing information security.

Cryptography deals with the actual securing of digital data. It refers to the design of mechanisms based on mathematical algorithms that provide fundamental information security services. You can think of cryptography as the establishment of a large toolkit containing different techniques in security applications.

A cryptosystem is an implementation of cryptographic techniques and their accompanying infrastructure to provide information security services. A cryptosystem is also referred to as a cipher system.

Data Confidentiality, Data Integrity, Authentication and Non-repudiation are core principles of modern-day cryptography.

1. Confidentiality refers to certain rules and guidelines usually executed under confidentiality agreements which ensure that the information is restricted to certain people or places.

2. Data integrity refers to maintaining and making sure that the data stays accurate and consistent over its entire life cycle.

3. Authentication is the process of making sure that the piece of data being claimed by the user belongs to it.

4. Non-repudiation refers to ability to make sure that a person or a party associated with a contract or a communication cannot deny the authenticity of their signature over their document or the sending of a message.