Cryptography

The large scale upsurge in exchange of information, electronic data or in other words, the escalation in digital communication, almost all of us communicate through cyberspace without being worried about secure exchange of information. Through cyberspace we communicate our private information on large scale. Thus it can be affirmed that the exchange of our private or confidential information through cyberspace is vulnerable to attack by cybercriminals allowing them to manipulate or even exploit our data without our consent. This necessitates the need to be aware and enable secure transmission of data using certain effective technique.

Information security can be thus defined as a term that describes or includes strategies, procedures etc for disabling stealing of information, illegal access to private data of an individual etc. However, ensuring the privacy and secure transmission of data in conjugation with reliable transmission it is necessary that the existing techniques are optimized and also some novel techniques are introduced that can potentially detect such threats and facilitate secure transmission of data (Riman & Abi-Char, 2015).

Considering such an urgent need for the secure transmission of data it was observed that since the ancient days of the Romans encoding has been serving as one of the most suitable strategies for maintaining the privacy of the information transmitted. Encoding actually refers to alteration or conversion of data into some form of symbols by making use of meaningless codes. While encoding is used during the transmission of data for enabling data security decoding, the opposite process of encoding is used to convert the data to its original state.

This process of encoding and decoding is completely based on a single key which is also known as identical key cryptography. During the process of encoding and decoding a single key is employed and a secure medium is required for transmission and reception of data for computing the secret key.
In order to enable secure transmission of data in cyberspace, it is necessary that data encryption and decryption is processed with higher efficacy. These processes enable conversion of data into an unreadable format in order to secure it and allow it to be accessed by authorized users only.

This encryption and decryption of data are together termed as cryptography. Cryptography is a technique used to protect the information that is transmitted through computers, electronic devices etc. (Koç, 2009). It enables secure and safe communication of private and critical data. Cryptography allows users to exchange information through different mediums without being vulnerable to cyber attacks (Bachman, Brown, & Norton, 2010).

It allows users and organizations to transmit and receive hidden messages into codes, numbers, symbols etc so as to enable secure transmission of data (Martin, 2016). Thus to summarize it can be asserted that the only objective of cryptography is to secure data, mails, other sophisticated information such as credit card and debit card details that are transmitted through a public network (Delfs & Knebl, 2007). Predominantly, there are two techniques used to convert information or encrypt it (Paar & Pelzl, 2010). They are symmetric and asymmetric cryptography (Gencoglu, 2019).

Cryptography is primarily categorized into three main types (Goffe & Sosin, 2005; McCabe, Trevino, & Butterfield, 2001; Muneer & Basha, 2009; Rogers, 2006):

Secret key Cryptography: In this cryptography, only one convert digital key is used and the same key is employed to encrypt as well as decrypt data. It applies that the same key is used by the sender as well as receiver to encrypt the data or convert into symbols etc and then decrypt the data for converting it into its original form (Muneer & Basha, 2009).

Public key Cryptography: Contrary to the secret key technique, this cryptography technique uses a pair of digital keys which facilitates higher security. In this technique, both the transmitting and receiving parties have a pair of keys, one public and one private key. While the public key is commonly shared between both the users, the other key is kept as private (Karls, 2009). While transmitting data, the sender employs pubic key for encrypting data and once the encrypted data is received, the receiver uses his secret key for decrypting the data.

Hash Functions: In this category of cryptography, there is not needed any digital key. Instead, it uses a hash value of fixed length which is encrypted into the plain text (Gençoğlu, 2019).
Some of the key objectives of employing cryptography for transmission of data are given as follows: