Cryptography

Secrecy is the heart of cryptography. Encryption is a practical means to achieve information secrecy. Modern encryption techniques are mathematical transformations (algorithms) which treat messages as numbers or algebraic elements in a space and transform them between a region of “meaningful messages” or cleartext and a region of “unintelligible messages” or ciphertext. In order to restore information, an encryption transformation must be reversible and the reversing transformation is called decryption. Conventional, encryption and decryption algorithms are parameterized by cryptographic keys. An encryption algorithm and a decryption algorithm plus the description on the format of messages and keys form a cryptographic systems or a cryptosystem. The rapid growth of information technology have led to significant advances in cryptography to protect the integrity and confidentiality of data is astounding.

In the modern information-oriented society, various devices are connected to the Internet as terminals, which necessitate technology for information security. Today, the world continues to witness an explosion of technology designed to help people communicate faster and more easily. We carry powerful digital computers in our pockets, exchange digital information in addition to voice data with our mobile phones, and surf the Web with high-end PDAs. In the near future, especially the coming of age of 3G wireless devices, every type of electronic data channel will be used to exchange every type of electronic information. One of the great challenges of the ability to communicate digitally is securing the increased amount of electronic information now exchanged over the network. To make the matter worse today, everyone wants to be everywhere and anywhere and be reached via his tech-mobile system. And that makes mobile security a top priority for many businesses that want to offer high-end mobile customer application.

Over the last three decades the traditional cryptosystems like DES, AES, RSA, DSA, One-Time-Pad, DLP, ElGamal and of late ECC, have thus far been the answer to the wide range of issues that impact modern secure communication, mobile data protection, including the assurance of privacy, the certainty of the transmitter or receiver’s identity, and the integrity of the communication. And of late centralized enterprise key management is playing role a in HR provisioning via people, process and technology. And of late the role key management is playing in enterprise mission-critical data encryption and network access control.

Digital Signature
It's an electronic signature that authenticates the identity of the sender of a message. It can be used also to ensure that the content of a sent message is unchanged, i.e., data integrity is preserved. If a digital signature is used, it is still possible for the recipient to see the message in plain text. That is, for a digital signature, the main idea is no longer to disguise what a message says, but rather to prove that it originates with a particular sender.

Digital Certificate
It is an electronic document issued by a certification authority (CA) and usually contains your name, a serial number, an expiration date and a copy of your public key (which anyone can use to encrypt messages to send to you – you then open the messages with your private key) and the digital signature of the CA. Use of a CA when doing business on-line allows anyone to check that you are who you say you are.

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
A PKI can be used by a company to securely and privately exchange data and money. It involves a digital certificate being issued that can identify an individual or company – but also offers directory services that can store, allocate and revoke certificates as and when necessary. There are several third party vendors of business PKI solutions, e.g. RSA, Baltimore, VeriSign, or Thawte that have gained public confidence as CAs.

Read More: A New Look at IT Security, Compliance & Risk Management Plan