Cyber Security Essentials

16 Cyber seCurity essentiAls

over DES. e reason is that an attacker can compare the decryption

of the ciphertext and the encryption of the plaintext. When both of

these values match, the attacker has successfully identified both keys

used for encrypting the message.

Symmetric encryption can be very fast and protect sensitive infor-

mation provided the key remains secret. e grouping of larger blocks

of data in the encryption algorithm makes it more difficult to decrypt

without the key. Key exchange and protection are the most important

aspects of symmetric cryptography because anyone who has the key

can both encrypt and decrypt messages. Asymmetric algorithms are

different because they use different keys for encryption and decryp-

tion, and in