Basics of encryption and decryption

You Might Be Interested In. Top Videos. Related Videos. Remember Me. Forgot password? Login or Sign Up. Login With Social Accounts. Sign up as. Implementing and managing an encryption solution requires an understanding of basic encryption processes, an awareness of the security properties provided by encryption, and knowledge of important requirements for effective encryption.

Encryption is a security control used primarily to provide confidentiality protection for data. It is a mathematical transformation to scramble data requiring protection plaintext into a form not easily understood by unauthorized people or machines ciphertext. After being transformed into ciphertext, the plaintext appears random and does not reveal anything about the content of the original data. Once encrypted, no person or machine can discern anything about the content of the original data by reading the encrypted form of the data.

Encryption is a reversible transformation. It is useful only when encrypted data ciphertext can be reversed back to its original, unencrypted form plaintext. If not reversible, the encrypted data are considered unreadable and unusable.

This reversal process is referred to as decryption. An encryption process has a corresponding decryption process, which is used to reverse the encrypted data ciphertext back to its original content plaintext. Each encryption and decryption function requires a cryptographic key.

A cryptographic key is a string of binary digits used as an input to encryption and decryption functions. In order for the encryption function to transform the plaintext into ciphertext and for the decryption function to reverse the ciphertext back to its original form, the encryption and decryption functions must use the same cryptographic key.

This is referred to as a symmetric key. The encryption functions specified in the Advanced Encryption Standard are widely supported in current systems and software. As depicted in the figure at right, the encryption function requires two inputs, plaintext and a cryptographic key, in order to output ciphertext.

The encryption function requires two inputs, plaintext and a cryptographic key, in order to output ciphertext. The decryption function requires two inputs, ciphertext and a cryptographic key, in order to output plaintext. Encryption is widely used in many computer applications to protect data in transit and at rest.

User involvement in the encryption process may vary for each application. In other implementations, users may be required to enter a password to encrypt or decrypt the protected data if the cryptographic key is derived from the password.

The conversion of encrypted data into its original form is called Decryption. It is generally a reverse process of encryption. It decodes the encrypted information so that an authorized user can only decrypt the data because decryption requires a secret key or password. One of the reasons for implementing an encryption-decryption system is privacy. As information travels over the Internet, it is necessary to scrutinise the access from unauthorized organizations or individuals.

Due to this, the data is encrypted to reduce data loss and theft. Few common items that are encrypted include text files, images, e-mail messages, user data and directories. The recipient of decryption receives a prompt or window in which a password can be entered to access the encrypted data. For decryption, the system extracts and converts the garbled data and transforms it into words and images that are easily understandable not only by a reader but also by a system.

Decryption can be done manually or automatically. Scrum Methodology. August 15, Visited 5 times, 1 visits today. Design Quality. Support Services. Show more. Pixel Density rupamili16 August 15, What is a Web Service rupamili16 August 15, Introduction to Wireless Sensor Networks rupamili16 August 15, Cybernetic Regulatory Systems rupamili16 August 15,