Asymmetric and Symmetric Encryption

Five Essays on Cryptography (3/5)

Cryptography is one of the core disciplines that we use to protect digital information today. It is part of the larger area of Information Security which has become recently one of the most discussed topics across industries. This series of five articles is aimed at those who would like to have an overview of the domain of cryptography, a bit of its history, and a grasp on important concepts and recent developments.

All articles in this series

• 1 Cryptography is Interwoven in our Daily Life
• 2 A Tool for Information Warfare Becomes a Field of Science
• 3 Asymmetric and Symmetric Encryption
• 4 Cryptographic Hashes and Credentials Management
• 5 The Use of Cryptography in our Economy (to appear)

Special thanks to my friend Philipp Jovanovic (Twitter @Daeinar) for sharing his expert opinion on this series of articles.

Comments, Feedback: Laurent Balmelli (Twitter Laurent Balmelli)

Modern Encryption

In this article I explore the modern usages of encryption in more details. In particular in the previous article I introduced one of the core issues when using encryption for confidentiality: the need to agree on a shared secret, i.e., in practice a key, in order to be able for two parties to encrypt and decrypt a secret communication.