Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Security Handbook

Summary

In this chapter, I have discussed the history of cryptography, from the thirteenth century to the Clipper Chip and all the way to the new IPSec standard. You should now be familiar with the government's involvement in the development of the science of cryptography, the export issues that continue to plague the industry, and the standard encryption protocols the government endorses. You should also have a basic understanding of private (secret) key and public key cryptography. Both have strengths and weaknesses, but if used properly either system can provide excellent security for your data. I also talked about some specific encryption algorithms. DES and Triple DES, RSA, MD5 (a hash algorithm), and Diffie Hellman should all be familiar ...