Learning Guide 2: Cryptography

Basics, Methods and Standards

 What is Cryptography?
• The art and science of concealing the
messages to introduce secrecy in information
security is recognized as cryptography.
• The word ‘cryptography’ was coined by
combining two Greek words, ‘Krypto’ meaning
hidden and ‘graphene’ meaning writing.
• The earlier Roman method of cryptography,
popularly known as the Caesar Shift
Cipher, relies on shifting the letters of a
message by an agreed number (three was a
common choice), the recipient of this message
would then shift the letters back by the same
number and obtain the original message.
 Steganography
• Steganography is similar but adds another dimension to
Cryptography. In this method, people not only want to
protect the secrecy of an information by concealing it, but
they also want to make sure any unauthorized person gets
no evidence that the information even exists. For
example, invisible watermarking.
• In steganography, an unintended recipient or an intruder
is unaware of the fact that observed data contains hidden
information. In cryptography, an intruder is normally
aware that data is being communicated, because they can
see the coded/scrambled message.
 Steganography
• Cryptography Cryptography or cryptology is the practice
and study of techniques for secure communication in the
presence of third parties called adversaries. More
generally, cryptography is about constructing and
analyzing protocols that prevent third parties or the public
from reading private messages
• Steganography Steganography is the practice of concealing
a file, message, image, or video within another file,
message, image, or video. Steganography requires two
files: one is the message which has to be hidden, the other
is the cover file which is used to hide the date/message.
• Let’s say there’s a person named Andy. Now suppose Andy sends
a message to his friend Sam who is on the other side of the
world. Now obviously he wants this message to be private and
nobody else should have access to the message. He uses a public
forum, for example, WhatsApp for sending this message. The
main goal is to secure this communication.
• Let’s say there is a smart guy called Eaves who secretly got
access to your communication channel. Since this guy has access
to your communication, he can do much more than just
eavesdropping, for example, he can try to change the message.
Now, this is just a small example. What if Eave gets access to
your private information? The result could be catastrophic.
• Cryptography is the practice and study of
techniques for securing communication and
data in the presence of adversaries.
• So, to protect his message, Andy first convert his readable
message to unreadable form. Here, he converts the message
to some random numbers. After that, he uses a key to encrypt
his message, in Cryptography, we call this ciphertext.

• Andy sends this ciphertext or encrypted message over the

communication channel, he won’t have to worry about
somebody in the middle of discovering his private messages.
Suppose, Eaves here discover the message and he somehow
manages to alter it before it reaches Sam.
• Now, Sam would need a key to decrypt the message to
recover the original plaintext. In order to convert the
ciphertext into plain text, Sam would need to use the
decryption key. Using the key he would convert the ciphertext
or the numerical value to the corresponding plain text.
• After using the key for decryption what will come out is the
original plaintext message, is an error. Now, this error is very
important. It is the way Sam knows that message sent
by Andy is not the same as the message that he received.
Thus, we can say that encryption is important to
communicate or share information over the network.
 Encryption Algorithm
• Cryptography is broadly classified into two
categories: Symmetric key Cryptography and Asymmetric
key Cryptography (popularly known as public key
cryptography).
• Now Symmetric key Cryptography is further categorized
as Classical Cryptography and Modern Cryptography.
• Further drilling down, Classical Cryptography is divided
into Transposition Cipher and Substitution Cipher. On the
other hand, Modern Cryptography is divided into Stream
Cipher and Block Cipher.
 How various Cryptographic Algorithms
Works?
• Symmetric Key Cryptography
• An encryption system in which the sender and 
receiver of a message share a single, 
common key that is used to encrypt and 
decrypt the message. The most 
popular symmetric–key system is the 
Data Encryption Standard (DES)
• Transposition Ciphers
• In Cryptography, a transposition cipher is a method of
encryption by which the positions held by units of
plaintext (which are commonly characters or groups of
characters) are shifted according to a regular system, so
that the ciphertext constitutes a permutation of the
plaintext.
• That is, the order of the units is changed (the plaintext is
reordered). Mathematically, a bijective function is used on
the characters’ positions to encrypt and an inverse
function to decrypt.