--Originally published at Computer and Information Security
Cryptography has been here since we are, we have to remember that to break a cryptography system was the objective of the first computers but also that cryptography and security are always related on iT or other for example:
Every poker player should learn a bit about cryptography. Because, in a way, playing poker is actually a form of cryptography. Let me explain.
Cryptography is the science of encoding information. Typically encryption is used to encode communications between two parties so that a third party is unable to understand it. For millennia, people have been trying to encrypt their communications—and the field of cryptography has become increasingly important over the years.
All of the innovation in cryptography is designed to address one problem. There is an inherent tradeoff between ease-of-use of a cryptographic method and its security.
Interestingly, if you are interested only in security—making sure that no one can possibly break your code—and not at all in ease-of-use, then the solution to perfect encryption is trivially simple. You can use a method called a one time pad.
Let’s say we have a message written in English that is 140 characters long. We want to encode this message so that only its intended recipient can read it. Before we send the message, we generate a list of 140 random numbers from 0 to 26. Maybe we have a computer generate this list. We write the random numbers down on a piece of paper and hand it to our intended recipient.
Then we compose the message. And for every character in our message, we add the corresponding number to it—adding meaning that we go that many letters forward in the alphabet to get the new letter. So if our letter is E, and the random number is 3, then in our Continue reading "Cryptography"
