Cryptography

Cryptography has been in use since a lot of time ago, mainly in the form of encrypted messages, and these ones were used in some important wars to communicate between allies and teams, sharing a key to decrypt them. A common example is the Enigma Machine, used in the World War 2 and decrypted by Alan Turing, this is known as the start of the modern computer era.

Nowadays Cryptography is a must in computer systems and the Internet, because a lot of personal and sensitive data is shared between websites and servers. The most common data that is encrypted are passwords and billing information, but all the data should be encrypted. There are a lot of encryption algorithms with its own complexity and security.

Some of the most popular are:

• RSA – Rivest-Shamir-Adleman
• AES – Advanced Encryption Standard
• Blowfish
• Twofish
• MD5
• SHA – Secure Hash Algorithm

If a website owner deals with sensitive information, like users personal information, billing data, all of this must be encrypted to ensure security and protection from hackers.

The objectives of cryptography are:

• Confidentiality – Information is accesible for authorized users. It uses codes and cipher.
• Integrity – Guarantees the correctness and completeness of the informations. It uses hash algorithms.
• Authenticity – Is the assurance that the sender of a message is who they say they are. It uses hash functions and zero-knowledge proof.