What are cryptography, encryption and cryptanalysis?
CRYPTOGRAPHY is the science of code writing, and cryptographic research explores and develops theories and methodologies for rendering messages or information unintelligible to others. Up until the early 1970s, cryptography was the almost exclusive concern of governments. During the past 15 years, however, there has been an explosion of academic and private sector interest in the field. The widespread use of computers and electronic data storage and transmission, marked most recently by the privatization and rapid growth of the Internet, has generated strong demand for scientific and technical solutions to ensure the security of information and computer-mediated communications. ENCRYPTION is applied cryptography – the use of cryptographic products or processes, e.g. to protect data or to authenticate a transaction. CRYPTANALYSIS is code-breaking, that is, the “cracking” of an encryption algorithm or system to reveal the hidden data (“plaintext”), either to get at the data for its own s
