cryptography The practise and study of
encryption and
decryption - encoding data so that it can only be decoded by
specific individuals. A system for encrypting and decrypting
data is a cryptosystem. These usually involve an
algorithmfor combining the original data ("
plaintext") with one or
more "keys" - numbers or strings of characters known only to
the sender and/or recipient. The resulting output is known as
The security of a cryptosystem usually depends on the secrecy
of (some of) the keys rather than with the supposed secrecy of
the
algorithm. A strong cryptosystem has a large range of
possible keys so that it is not possible to just try all
cryptosystem will produce ciphertext which appears random to
all standard statistical tests. A strong cryptosystem will
resist all known previous methods for breaking codes
(2000-01-16)