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Intro to Encryption

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the getting-on-the-same-page dept.

An anonymous reader submitted a Techworld story which is a sort of encryption primer. The difference between codes & cyphers, and what all those acronyms like RSA and DES actually mean. This is good primer material for newbs, and a good refresher for fogeys.

1 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I realized something while reading the article. by grahamsz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Say tommorrow someone discovered an efficient technique for computing the prime factors of a composite. That would blow RSA and probably DSA out of the water - rendering most parts of PGP/GPG worthless.

    Unless we have other asymetric ciphers to fall back on, then e-commerce would be wiped out.

    Additionally algorithms with very low computational requirements are of particular importance since we need encryption that can run on smart cards, but cant be broken by super computers.