Solaris 8 Security

Keys

One of the most important concepts in cryptography is the key. A key is a piece of data (usually a finite block or stream of bits) used with an encryption algorithm to transform plain text (the data that is to be encrypted) into cipher text (the encrypted data). The security of an encryption algorithm lies in the key and the algorithm: Anyone who knows the key or can find it, and who knows the algorithm, can decrypt the cipher text and get the plain text. There are no secrets in the algorithm (or, at least, there shouldn’t be, but that’s a different story). A number of issues are associated with keys, and many different attacks can be carried out against them, such as the brute-force attack (see the next section and the section “Key Management ...