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  Report: Cryptography

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 WORLD-INFOSTRUCTURE > CRYPTOGRAPHY > KEY-SYSTEMS
  Key-Systems


As stated, telecommunication is seen as an unreliable media for transporting secret messages. Therefore today, cryptography is needed more than ever before, especially for e-commerce.
Key cryptosystems try to provide more privacy.

symmetric-key cryptosystems:
The same key is used for both encryption and decryption. In this case the encipherer and the recipient of the message/text have to agree on a common key before the enciphering-process can start. And most of all they should trust each other. And exactly this is the main problem of this system: how to exchange the key without offering an opportunity for stealing it?
In former times messengers or pigeons were doing the exchange of those keys.

Symmetric-key systems make sense in small entities. If a lot of people are spread over a wide area and belong to the same network, distributing the keys starts getting complicated.
Today, those cryptosystems get controlled by other keys, based on highly complex mathematical algorithms.
some symmetric-key systems are:

- DES (Data Encryption Standard), the standard for credit cards
- Triple-DES, which is a variation of DES, encrypting the plaintext three times.
- IDEA (International Data Encryption Standard)
- blowfish encryption algorithm, which is said to be faster than DES and IDEA

Security and confidence are the key-words for a popular key-system: As DES and its successors have been used for so many years and by many people without having been broken, they are considered safe - safer than others, not used that frequently, no matter whether they are actually safer or not.

For further information see:
http://www.sbox.tu-graz.ac.at/home/j/jonny/projects/crypto/symmetr/content.htm




browse Report:
Cryptography
    Abstract
 ...
-3   Cryptography's Terms and background
-2   So what does cryptography mean?
-1   some essential definitions
0   Key-Systems
+1   Asymmetric or Public-Key-Cryptosystems
+2   Steganography
+3   Digital Signatures, Timestamps etc
     ...
Epilogue
 RESEARCH MATRIX