Question

Select one type of cryptography or encryption and explain it in detail. Include the benefits as well as the limitations of this type of encryption. Your summary should be 2-3 paragraphs in length

Answer 1

Solution:

Cryptography is the process of converting the plain text to cipher text using different types of techniques. The main motto of cryptography is to ensure the data is safely transmitted from sender to receiver as well as from receiver to sender. So in order to safely transfer data from sender to receiver we use a key which is a string which is used to encrypt as well as decrypt the data we want to transfer. There are three different types of cryptography or encryption techniques. They are symmetric-key cryptography, public-key cryptography and hash functions.

Now we will discuss about symmetric key cryptography technique. Symmetric key cryptography is a technique in which we use a single common key to encrypt the data as well as to decrypt the data. Plain text is readable and understandable and cipher text is not readable and it cannot be understood. Encryption is converting plain text to cipher text using a key and decryption is to convert cipher text to plain text using the key. So in this technique the sender and receiver uses the same key. Examples are DES, AES etc.,. This is also called as secret key cryptography because only sender and receiver only knows the key in this technique.

This technique also has some benefits and limitations. Symmetric key cryptography works faster compared to other techniques. one biggest advantage is secret key is needed in order to encrypt or decrypt the data. The drawback of this technique is as the key should be transferred to the sender in some way so there is a chance that the key can be exchanged or exposed to others if it is not done securely.