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A disk cipher device of the Jefferson type from the 2nd quarter of the 19th century in the National Cryptologic Museum. The Jefferson disk, also called the Bazeries cylinder or wheel cypher, [1] was a cipher system commonly attributed to Thomas Jefferson that uses a set of wheels or disks, each with letters of the alphabet arranged around their edge in an order, which is different for each ...
Symmetric-key algorithms[ a] are algorithms for cryptography that use the same cryptographic keys for both the encryption of plaintext and the decryption of ciphertext. The keys may be identical, or there may be a simple transformation to go between the two keys. [ 1] The keys, in practice, represent a shared secret between two or more parties ...
In cryptography, a cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption —a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is encipherment. To encipher or encode is to convert information into cipher or code. In common parlance, "cipher" is synonymous with "code", as ...
Key (cryptography) A key in cryptography is a piece of information, usually a string of numbers or letters that are stored in a file, which, when processed through a cryptographic algorithm, can encode or decode cryptographic data. Based on the used method, the key can be different sizes and varieties, but in all cases, the strength of the ...
One-time pad. A format of one-time pad used by the U.S. National Security Agency, code named DIANA. The table on the right is an aid for converting between plaintext and ciphertext using the characters at left as the key. In cryptography, the one-time pad ( OTP) is an encryption technique that cannot be cracked, but requires the use of a single ...
The XOR cipher is often used in computer malware to make reverse engineering more difficult. If the key is random and is at least as long as the message, the XOR cipher is much more secure than when there is key repetition within a message. [4] When the keystream is generated by a pseudo-random number generator, the result is a stream cipher.
In cryptography, a transposition cipher (also known as a permutation cipher) is a method of encryption which scrambles the positions of characters ( transposition) without changing the characters themselves. Transposition ciphers reorder units of plaintext (typically characters or groups of characters) according to a regular system to produce a ...
In a columnar cipher, the original message is arranged in a rectangle, from left to right and top to bottom. Next, a key is chosen and used to assign a number to each column in the rectangle to determine the order of rearrangement. The number corresponding to the letters in the key is determined by their place in the alphabet, i.e.