Networking Fundamentals

Encryption

Encryption is the mechanism of taking data that is readable (clear text) and putting it through a mathematical calculation (algorithm) to produce data that is not readable (cipher text). The data is encrypted with what is known as a key and is deciphered using a key. The longer the key, the harder the encryption should be to crack. If the data is encrypted and decrypted using the same key, this is known as symmetric encryption. If you use one key to encrypt the data and it can only be decrypted by a second, mathematically-linked key, then you are using asymmetric encryption. For this exam, you do not need to know anything more than that as far as the background of encryption is concerned. Let's discuss the encryption techniques ...