Cryptography fundamentals

Before we will get into details, let’s look at #cryptography from a bird’s eye view.

The main terms which need to be introduced are:
- plaintext: the message itself we want to encrypt
- ciphertext: the encrypted message
- key: a sequence of numbers used to encrypt/decrypt
- #encryption: the process of changing plaintext into ciphertext in a way that only the authorized parties can access it
- #decryption: the process of retrieving plaintext from the ciphertext

It’s also worth noticing that there are two types of cryptography:
- symmetric where the key used in encryption and decryption is the same
- asymmetric where the key used in encryption is different from the one used in decryption.

Both types are needed at different stages and mechanisms of establishing #securecommunications. But this will be covered in the next posts.