ACCORDING TO Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, cryptography is “the act or art of writing in secret characters,” and, from the Free Online Dictionary of Computing, cryptography is “encoding data so that it can only be decoded by specific individuals.” These two definitions of cryptography delineate its function, but what does cryptography entail? Cryptography comprises the algorithms, or ciphers, used to encrypt and decrypt data, which are collectively called a cryptosystem. Most of these cryptographic ciphers take unencrypted data, called plaintext, and use one or more keys (i.e., a string of numbers or characters ...
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