CRYPTOGRAPHY AND ITS RECENT TRENDS
1. INTRODUCTION
The Internet or the global Internet is the internationally connected network of computer networks with addresses that are administrated by IANA (Internet address and Naming Authority). It grew dramatically because anyone can connect to it and anyone connected to it can connect others to it as well. Each site that connected to it, can become an Internet Service provider to other sites Does increased security provide comfort to paranoid people? Or does security provide some very basic protections that we are naive to believe that we don't need? During this time when the Internet provides essential communication between tens of millions of people and is being increasingly used as a tool for commerce, security becomes a tremendously important issue to deal with. There are many aspects to security and many applications, ranging from secure commerce and payments to private communications and protecting passwords. One essential aspect for secure communications is that of cryptography. This paper has two major purposes. The first is to define some of the terms and concepts behind basic cryptographic methods, and to offer a way to compare the myriad cryptographic schemes in use today. The second is to provide some real examples of cryptography and new trends in use today. I would like to say at the outset that this paper is very focused on terms, concepts, and schemes in current use and is not a treatise of the whole field.
2. THE PURPOSE OF CRYPTOGRAPHY
Cryptography is the science of writing in secret code and is an ancient art;
there are some specific security requirements, including:
Authentication: The process of proving one's identity.
Privacy/confidentiality: Ensuring that no one can read the message except the intended receiver.
Integrity: Assuring the receiver that the received message has not been altered in any way from the original.
Non-repudiation: A mechanism to prove that the sender really sent this message.
Cryptography, then, not only protects data from theft or alteration, but can also be used for user authentication. There are, in general, three types of cryptographic schemes typically used to accomplish these goals: secret key (or symmetric) cryptography, public-key (or asymmetric) cryptography, and hash functions, each of which is described below. In all cases, the initial unencrypted data is referred to as plaintext. It is encrypted into cipher text, which will in turn (usually) be decrypted into usable plaintext.
3. TYPES OF CRYPTOGRAPHIC ALGORITHMS
There are several ways of classifying cryptographic algorithms.
Secret Key Cryptography (SKC): Uses a single key for both encryption and decryption.
Public Key Cryptography (PKC): Uses one key for encryption and another for decryption.
Hash Functions: Uses a mathematical transformation to irreversibly "encrypt" information.
First is a crypto algorithm, which specifies the mathematical transform action that is performed on data to encrypt (or) decrypt it. Crypto algorithm is a procedure that takes the plain text data and transforms it into cipher text in a reversible way.
4. NEW TREND IN CRYPTOGRAPHY
Elliptic Curve Cryptography
In general, public-key cryptography systems uses hard-to-solve problems as the basis of the algorithm. The most predominant algorithm today for public-key cryptography is RSA, based on the prime factors of very large integers. While RSA can be successfully attacked, the mathematics of the algorithm has not been comprised, per se; instead, computational brute-force has broken the keys. The defense is "simple" keep the size of the integer to be factored ahead of the computational curve! In 1985, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) was proposed independently by cryptographers Victor Miller (IBM) and Koblitz (University of Washington). ECC is based on the difficulty of solving the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP). Like the prime factorization problem, ECDLP is another "hard" problem that is deceptively simple to state: Given two points, P and Q, on an elliptic curve, find the integer n, if it exists, such that p= nQ. Elliptic curves combine number theory and algebraic geometry. These curves can be defined over any field of numbers (i.e., real, integer, complex) although we generally see them used over finite fields for applications in cryptography. An elliptic curve consists of the set of real numbers (x, y) that satisfies the equation:y2 = x3 + ax + b. An attacker might know P and Q but finding the integer, n, is a difficult problem to solve. Q is the public key, then, and n is the private key.
5. CONCLUSION
We use different types of algorithms to establish security services in different service mechanisms. We use either private key cryptography or public key cryptography according to requirement. If we want to send message quickly we use private key algorithm and if we want to send messages secretly we use public key algorithm. Hence let us hope that the NEW TRENDS of cryptography saves the messages from the DANGEROUS CLUTCHES OF MESSAGE HACKERS.
