Hello Friend …
In this series we’ll be taking a walk through a brief introduction to the art of cryptography.
We’ll try to cover different algorithms, implementations and vulnerabilities to help you unleash your inner hacker even if you don’t have a dev background.
I may have said that it’ll be a brief introduction but I suggest you buckle up dear because shit is about to get real.
WTF is Cryptography ?
Long story short, some guy around 1900 BC in Egypt craved a text replacing the original symbols with unusual ones, his purpose wasn’t probably to hide the original message but he surely inspired Julius Caesar a roman emperor around 100 BC to write letters that can be understandable only by his army generals by converting the original message to some gibberish text so it won’t be useful to the enemy in case of the messenger was intercepted.
Terminology
The original message that Julius Caesar wrote is what we call today a Plaintext, the conversion that was made to this plaintext before it was sent is called Encryption resulting a Ciphertext which was Decrypted back to it’s readable form by the army generals. The algorithm or the method that was used to perform the encryption or the decryption is called a Cipher. I recommend you get used to these terms because we’ll be using them from now on.
A Cryptosystem or Cipher system is the implementation of the techniques we talked about earlier to provide a well secured message, while cryptoanalysis is the science and art of analyzing and breaking down cryptosystems.
What’s next ?
let’s sum up , Cryptography is the art and science of keeping messages secure meaning that only the intended receiver can read it , and assure Integrity meaning that the received message isn’t altered from the original .
Next in this series we’ll be studying types of cryptography and measuring how secure a cryptosystem is before starting to analyze and implement some ciphers, identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities among different algorithms .
See you soon Friend.
