Practical Network Scanning

Symmetric encryption

In symmetric encryption, a single key is used both to encrypt and decrypt traffic. Symmetric encryptions are fast, simple and easy to implement. However, some easy ciphers are vulnerable to brute-force attacks, making management a complex job. If the key is compromised, then the whole system becomes vulnerable. Data encryption standard (DES) and Advance encryption standard (AES) are symmetric systems, but AES is much more reliable than DES.

The symmetric encryption scheme has five elements:

• Plain-text: Refers to the original data that needs to be encrypted
• Encryption Algorithm: Refers to a combination of ciphers used to encrypt data
• Secure Key: Refers to input in the encryption algorithm
• Cipher-text: Refers to output ...