What is cryptology?
Cryptology or cryptography is the study and process of encoding and decoding plain text messages so that they cannot be read by anyone without a guide or key. Historians date the use of cryptology back to Ancient Egyptian times and suggests that secret codes developed quite soon after written language was developed. As well, conversation might be encoded, as is frequent radio transmissions or cell phone conversations. Cryptology seems to many a rather romantic field, and the deciphering of secret messages is the subject of many thriller novels. Most recently, The Da Vinci Code involved a mystery of a series of clues and codes that pointed to a Catholic Church conspiracy to keep people from finding out that Mary Magdalene was one of the early disciples of Jesus Christ. The idea of secret codes and hidden messages enchants many, accounting for the great popularity of Dan Brown’s novel. Today, cryptology is often very technical in encoding or decoding processes, due to the use of computer
Cryptology is the science of coding and decoding secret messages. (Crypto is the Greek root for secret or hidden). It is usually divided into Cryptography, which concerns designing cryptosystems for coding and decoding messages, and the more glamorous Cryptanalysis, which is concerned with “breaking” cryptosystems, or deciphering messages without prior detailed knowledge of the cryptosystem. You might think the world would be a lot better if we all got along and communicated openly with one another, but it has been an unfortunate fact since time began that there have been lots of reasons for desiring secure communication. The twentieth century has seen a dramatic increase in the need for secure communications in matters of politics, commerce, and even in social communication, as more and more of us depend on electronic mail and other computer-based forms of communication. It is very simple for any organization that provides access to electronic mail to monitor the messages that are s
Most people will have heard of encryption, which is a means to provide confidentiality for data. Fewer people are aware that information may require more forms of protection than just confidentiality however, and cryptology encompasses mechanisms other than encryption. Cryptology therefore includes: • encryption • key management, including such things as key distribution, key certification, and key exchange. • distributed trust, including key escrow, secret sharing, and secure distributed computation, • entity authentication (sometimes called identification), • data authentication (including non-repudiation), • timestamping and digital notarization, • protocol design and analysis, • payment systems and electronic commerce, • watermarking and fingerprinting, • covert channels. Cryptology can only work if systems are able to store and perform processing with keys in such a way that the keys are not compromised. Cryptology can sometimes mitigate much of the risk by novel key management or
