Encryption terms

 

Plaintext - A message or data, such as a file, that is in a human readable form or in form that any program can read without requiring decryption of that file. It could be a simple text document written on a notepad, word document, word pad document or any textual file document. Such a file can be read by anyone without decrypting. Those unsecured typed of data are called plaintext.

Ciphertext - An opposite of plaintext. It is an encrypted message or data, scrambled into unreadable form.

Encryption - A process where you scramble a message, or any other kind of information so it can not be read by anyone who does not have the right key for decrypting it.

Decryption - An opposite of encryption, converting (unscrambling) files or documents from an encrypted form (ciphertext) to an unencrypted form (plaintext).

Cryptology - Science that covers both cryptography and cryptanalysis.

Cryptography - Science of hiding information, or developing encryption methods, systems and technologies.

Cryptanalysis - Study of breaking encryption methods or systems, breaking or cracking the codes and trying to break the encrypted message back into it readable form.

Algorithm - A mathematical formula, or method used to scramble the bits of a message (the binary data, 1's and 0's) from its original form into ciphertext (encrypted data).

Key - Secret piece of information, such as password, identification number, digital certificate etc used in conjunction with algorithm to encrypt data or file. To encrypt a file you need an algorithm and a key, to decrypt a data you also need an algorithm and a key. The key may, or may not be the same for file encryption.

Symmetric key encryption (also called private or shared) - A method where there is only one single key, shared between two parties that want to exchange encrypted files.

Asymmetric key encryption (also called public) - A method where there are two keys used to encrypt and decrypt messages or files.

 

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