| dc.description.abstract | Throughout history people have tried to develop methods to secure the exchange of information. Due to the influence of the information technology revolution, protecting data of different types has become as essential requirement. The technological innovations of the
military are responsible for a wide range of industrial and commercial advances and the implementation of the protocols and procedures associated with military data processing algorithms have influenced certain industry standards that are constantly being scrutinized and improved upon. Different standards have been developed for particular market sectors. For example, DES (Data Encryption Standard) was originally developed in the early 1970s and, in 1976, was selected by the Federal Information Processing Standard for use in the USA. Since that time, DES has had widespread use internationally and was upgraded to triple DES or DES3 in the 1990s (essentially, but not literally, a triple encryption version of DES in order to compensate for the relatively low key length associated with the original (DES). Specialized areas of information security are in confidentiality, data integrity, access control, identification, authentication and authorization. The implementation associated with these areas depend on the situation and requirement specifications. The design of new approaches, methodology and analysis of the strengths and weaknesses associated with a practical implementation are similar to the development of cryptographic algorithms. Private messaging (encrypting email attachments, for example) information security measures, financial transactions and a host of online services in information protection use specific mathematical techniques and the design of computational methods exclusive to the study of cryptography. Cryptology is the study of systems that typically originate from a consideration of the
ideal circumstances under which secure information exchange is to take place. It involves the study of cryptographic and other processes that might be introduced for breaking the output of such systems - cryptanalysis. This includes the introduction of formal mathematical
methods for the design of a cryptosystem and for estimating its theoretical level of security. A point of note is that the mathematical strength of a cryptographic algorithm is a necessary but not a sufficient requirement for a system to be acceptably secure. In the ideal case, the cryptographic strength of an algorithm and/or implementation method can be checked by means of proving its resistance to various kinds of known attacks. However, in practice, this does not mean that the algorithm and/or its specific application is secure because other
unknown attacks may exist. For this reason, the security of a cryptosystem is often based on knowledge of its working legacy and the confidence level that a community has acquired from its continual use over many years often due to various up-grades, additions and modifications as have been considered necessary. Thus, modern systems for securing information exchange are often based to a large degree on past legacies associated with the performance of relatively well established techniques. | en_US |
