Enterprise Cloud Security and Governance

Symmetric key cryptography

Symmetric key algorithms are those which use a single set of keys for both encryption and decryption of data. This key is generally a shared secret between multiple parties who want to encrypt or decrypt the data.

Let's understand how a symmetric key encryption works:

Since we have understood the basics of symmetric key cryptography, let's go one step deeper to understand how it works.

In cryptography, ciphers are algorithms that perform the encryption and decryption functionality. There are two main categories of ciphers:

• Stream cipher
• Block cipher