Introduction
Cryptography or cryptology (from Ancient Greek: κρυπτός, translit. kryptós "hidden, secret"; and γράφειν graphein, "to write", or -λογία -logia, "study", respectively) is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties called adversaries. More generally, cryptography is about constructing and analyzing protocols that prevent third parties or the public from reading private messages; various aspects in information security such as data confidentiality, data integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation are central to modern cryptography. Modern cryptography exists at the intersection of the disciplines of mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering, communication science, and physics. Applications of cryptography include electronic commerce, chip-based payment cards, digital currencies, computer passwords, and military communications.
Cryptography prior to the modern age was effectively synonymous with encryption, the conversion of information from a readable state to apparent nonsense. The originator of an encrypted message shares the decoding technique only with intended recipients to preclude access from adversaries. The cryptography literature often uses the names Alice ("A") for the sender, Bob ("B") for the intended recipient, and Eve ("eavesdropper") for the adversary. Since the development of rotor cipher machines in World War I and the advent of computers in World War II, the methods used to carry out cryptology have become increasingly complex and its application more widespread. |
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The Enigma machines are a series of electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines, mainly developed and used in the early- to mid-20th century to protect commercial, diplomatic and military communication. Enigma was invented by the German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I. Early models were used commercially from the early 1920s, and adopted by military and government services of several countries, most notably Nazi Germany before and during World War II. Several different Enigma models were produced, but the German military models, having a plugboard, were the most complex. Japanese and Italian models were also in use. |
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In cryptography, the EFF DES cracker (nicknamed "Deep Crack") is a machine built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 1998, to perform a brute force search of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) cipher's key space – that is, to decrypt an encrypted message by trying every possible key. The aim in doing this was to prove that the key size of DES was not sufficient to be secure.
Did you know...
...that the Pigpen cipher was used by the Freemasons for correspondence and record keeping?
...that Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski (pictured) deduced the wiring of the German Enigma machine in 1932 using theorems about permutations?
...that acoustic cryptanalysis is a type of attack that exploits sound in order to compromise a system?
...that one scheme to defeat spam involves proving that the sender has performed a small amount of computation, a proof-of-work system?
Miscellaneous
- WikiProject Cryptography
- WikiReader in Cryptography — Inactive since 2007.
- Automatic link: Recent changes in articles about cryptography
- Topics in cryptography — an annotated list of cryptography topics
Subcategories
News
- Andrey Bogdanov, Dmitry Khovratovich, and Christian Rechberger presented the first key-recovery attacks on full AES. [1]