Thursday 24 November 2011

Use of Modern Cryptography

Cryptography originally means secret writing. It is is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication and making this communication possible.

In the modern world cryptography is used for many things. Login system are crypted and using high end cryptography to encrypt the connection and secure it. Databases and especially government information is usually crypted and hashed to improve the security and prevent from beiing cracked.

The use of Cryptography in VPN's is also important. A VPN will basically route all your traffic through the VPN server. This way it give the "VPN service" and makes your IP address hidden on the internet. Although, browsing means gathering information. If the VPN would not encrypt this information, it would be crackable and not secure. Nowadays they have advanced (double)encryptions to promise the best security you could have.

Another way is the use to dodge antiVirusses. Companies have false positives very often. This is because their bytes are flagged. Although, it might be legitimate use. The bytes are flagged because virusses might use the same signature or bytes. This clashes and the AntiVirus-database just has to flag the legitimate program too. For companies this is really a bad thing. Their programs become suspicious and their customers will decrease. This is where the use of "Crypters" come in. These can scramble and pack the program in such a way that the signatures are not noticable anymore. So they became fully undetected now.

Crypters are also used to undetected virusses and make it look clean for AVs. This is a negative way of using crypters. The bytes of the virus get encrypted in a way that its not readable in the original way.

Steganography also uses cryptography. This is the art of putting messages and text into pictures. A human eye can't see the text but after decrypting the picture, the message gets readable. This is used by rebels and secret orginanisations to deliver a secret message safely.

Traditional cryptography
The earliest forms of secret writing required little more than local pen and paper analogs, as most people could not read. More literacy, or literate opponents, required actual cryptography. The main classical cipher types are transposition ciphers, which rearrange the order of letters in a message. The word "car" would be "rca" for example. This is the basic concept of shifting letters with a special algorithm. In computerlanguage it's the bytes that are shifted this way instead of the letters. Simply compressing something would already make things unreadable for the human eye.


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