What is Cryptography?

Cryptography and Encryption

Cryptography is the science of securing information and communications by transforming data into a coded format, ensuring that only authorized parties can access and understand it. At its core, cryptography uses mathematical algorithms and keys to convert plaintext (readable data) into ciphertext (an unreadable, encrypted form), a process known as encryption. Decryption is the reverse process, turning ciphertext back into plaintext with the correct key. Modern cryptography serves vital roles in protecting sensitive information, verifying identities, and ensuring data integrity in applications like online banking, secure emails, and internet browsing. There are two main types of encryption: symmetric (using a single shared key) and asymmetric (using a public and private key pair). By safeguarding confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity, cryptography is fundamental to cybersecurity in today’s digital world.

Learn About Cryptography

Within Khan Academy’s Applied Mathematics section are several lessons on cryptography. Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization that provides education via free videos. Their library of videos covers K-12 math, science topics such as biology, chemistry, and physics, and even reaches into the humanities with playlists on finance and history. The videos are about 10 minutes each making them easily digestible.

The cryptography training includes:

Ancient Cryptography

  1. What is Cryptography?
  2. Probability Space
  3. The Caesar Cipher
  4. Polyalphabetic Cipher
  5. The One-Time Pad
  6. Frequency Stability
  7. The Enigma Encryption Machine (case study)
  8. Perfect Secrecy
  9. Pseudorandom Number Generators

Modern Cryptography

  1. The Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic
  2. Public Key Cryptography: what is it?
  3. The Discrete Logarithm Problem
  4. Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange
  5. RSA Encryption: step 1
  6. RSA Encryption: step 2
  7. RSA Encryption: step 3
  8. Euler’s Totient Function
  9. RSA Encryption: step 4
  10. What should we learn next?

New videos are constantly being added in all topic areas, so check out Khan Academy.

Want to learn more about cryptography? SecureRF offers this paper:

An Introduction to Cryptographic Security Methods and Their Role in Securing Low Resource Computing Devices An Overview of Public-key Cryptosystems based on RSA, Diffie-Hellman and the Next Generation of Public-key Cryptographic Security for Low-Resource Computing Devices – the Algebraic Eraser

Expert Cryptography Whitepapers

If you want to go deeper on cryptography and encryption from world-class cryptographers and mathematicians, see these additional papers.

 

 

 

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