Cryptography (Introduction)

Cryptography is practice or study of hiding information. If say Alice wants to send some secret information to Bob over a communication medium which is open and is accessible to everyone, she should scramble that message in such a way so that only bob will be able to make out of it. Or in other words, Alice will encrypt the plain text message to generate cipher text message. and bob will decrypt the cipher text to generate same plain text message back. This whole process is called cryptography.

This video will answer the questions like what is the need to have cryptography? what are the requirements of a good cryptographic algorithm? The fundamental terms in cryptography and some basic algorithms.

The fundamental objectives of any good cryptographic algorithm are

• 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.

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Cryptography is the science of writing in secret code and is an ancient art; the first documented use of cryptography in writing dates back to circa 1900 B.C. when an Egyptian scribe used non-standard hieroglyphs in an inscription.

I will be creating a complete set of tutorial for understanding cryptography. This tutorial will include videos on symmetric key cryptography, public key cryptography to more advanced topics like zero knowledge proofs, key maintenance etc.

Useful links

• Code book of cryptography
• Cryptography WiKi
• Handbook of Applied Cryptography : Google Books

Amit Vartak, 27 is working in wired and wireless security fields since last 3-4 years. His current area of interest includes IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) suite of protocols, vulnerabilities in these protocols and countermeasure for those vulnerabilities. Working on cutting edge tools and technology always keeps him busy. He has contributed from concept level to final prototyping for the presentations in Defcon 2007 (The Emperor Has No Cloak - WEP Cloaking Exposed) and Toorcon 2007 (Caffe latte attack). He holds 2 patents with USPTO (current status: Patent Pending) and a few papers in IEEE journals on wireless protocol vulnerabilities. Prior to this, he was working on MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems) and has published a few papers in SPIE and ICMAT. (Yeah… kindda orthogonal fields… but technology really doesn’t limit the talent :) He did his masters in Electrical Engineering from one of the premier institutes in India, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-Bombay) and his under graduation, from University of Mumbai in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering. He is currently working with AirTight Networks Inc. as a team lead in technology group since last 3 years.You can get in touch with him at amitcv[at]gmail[dot]com