GPG, or GNU Privacy Guard, is a free replacement and competing product for PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). The project is a data encryption and decryption application which provides end-users with a cryptographic privacy and authentication system for communicating electronic data. GPG can be used to sign, encrypt, and decrypt text, for email, files, directories, and …
RSA, which stands for Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman, is a security algorithm used in digital cryptography. RSA differs from older symmetric algorithms because it has the ability of allowing digital signing as well as advanced encryption for online commerce systems and high-profile institutions. RSA was one of the first major advancements in digital cryptography but …
TrueCrypt is a free, open source disk encryption software that is available for the Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Mac, Linux, and Unix operating systems. TrueCrypt provides users with real time encryption/decryption, parallelization and pipelining to read/write to partitions as fast as non-encrypted partitions, and plausible deniability through hidden volumes and hidden operating systems …
Certificate Authority or Certification Authority (CA) is an entity, which is core to many PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) schemes, whose purpose is to issue digital certificates to use by other parties. It exemplifies a trusted third party. Some certification authorities may charge a fee for their service while some other CAs are free. It is …
X.509 is an ITU-T (ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector) standard for PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) in cryptography, which, amongst many other things, defines specific formats for PKC (Public Key Certificates) and the algorithm that verifies a given certificate path is valid under a give PKI (called the certification path validation algorithm). X.509 History X.509 began in …
A brute force attack consists of trying every possible code, combination, or password until the right one is found. Determining the Difficulty of a Brute Force Attack The difficulty of a brute force attack depends on several factors, such as: How long can the key be? How many possible values can each key component have? …
Digital certificates are the equivalent of a driver’s license, a marriage license, or any other form of identity. The only difference is that a digital certificate is used in conjunction with a public key encryption system. Digital certificates are electronic files that simply work as an online passport. Digital certificates are issued by a third …
A one-time pad is a form of encryption that is difficult to decipher or crack if one is not the intended recipient. If done correctly, the strength of encryption of plaintext can almost be impossible to break in a useful timeframe. The system takes each character from plaintext and uses modular addition with a character …
The XOR encryption is a simple symmetric cipher that is used in many applications where security is not a defined requirement. The XOR Operator XOR (Exclusive OR) is a bitwise operator from binary mathematics. The six bitwise operators, as defined in the C programming language, are: Operation Symbol AND & Inclusive OR | Exclusive OR …
Symmetric Cryptographic Algorithms DES (Data Encryption Standard) is perhaps the most widely used cryptographic algorithm. DES is based upon IBM’s Lucifer algorithm. The NBS (National Bureau of Standards) and the NSA (National Security Agency) adopted DES as a federal standard in 1977. DES is a symmetric cipher with an effective key length of 56 bits. …