| Dictionary, Encyclopedia and Thesaurus - The Free Dictionary 3,591,097,749 visitors served. |
Dictionary/ thesaurus | Medical dictionary | Legal dictionary | Financial dictionary | Acronyms | Idioms | Encyclopedia | Wikipedia encyclopedia | ? |
data encryption |
Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Wikipedia, Hutchinson | 0.02 sec. |
|
|
data encryption, the process of scrambling stored or transmitted information so that it is unintelligible until it is unscrambled by the intended recipient. Historically, data encryption has been used primarily to protect diplomatic and military secrets from foreign governments. It is also now used increasingly by the financial industry to protect money transfers, by merchants to protect credit-card information in electronic commerce, and by corporations to secure sensitive communications of proprietary information.
All modern cryptography cryptography [Gr.,=hidden writing], science of secret writing. There are many devices by which a message can be concealed from the casual reader, e.g., invisible writing, but the term cryptography strictly applies to translating messages into cipher or code. In 1977 the Data Encryption Standard (DES), a symmetric algorithm, was adopted in the United States as a federal standard. DES and the International Data Encryption Algorithm (IDEA) are the two most commonly used symmetric techniques. The most common asymmetric technique is the RSA algorithm, named after Ronald Rivest, Adi Shami, and Len Adleman, who invented it while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977. Other commonly used encryption algorithms include Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), and Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (S-HTTP). The National Institute of Standards and Technology National Institute of Standards and Technology, governmental agency within the U.S. Dept. of Commerce with the mission of "working with industry to develop and apply technology, measurements, and standards" in the national interest. Data encryption is regarded by the U.S. government as a national-security issue because it can interfere with intelligence gathering—therefore, it is subject to export controls, which in turn make it difficult for U.S. companies to function competitively in the international marketplace. To resolve this dilemma, the federal government in 1993 proposed key escrow encryption, an approach, embodied in an electronic device called a "Clipper chip," that makes broadly available a purportedly unbreakable encryption technique (although the code was broken by researchers in 1995) with keys to unlock the information held in escrow for national security and law-enforcement purposes by the federal government. This approach, however, has been unacceptable to civil libertarians and to the international community. In 1994 the Clipper algorithm (called Skipjack) was specified in the Escrow Encryption Standard (EES), a voluntary federal standard for encryption of voice, facsimile (fax), and data communications over ordinary telephone lines. A subsequent compromise escrow scheme intended to create a standard for data encryption that balanced the needs of national security, law enforcement, and personal freedom was rejected in 1995; a compromise proposed in 1999 was also controversial. data encryptionProcess of disguising information as “ciphertext,” or data that will be unintelligible to an unauthorized person. Decryption is the process of converting ciphertext back into its original format, sometimes called plaintext (see cryptography). Computers encrypt data by applying an algorithm to a block of data. A personal key known only to the message's transmitter and intended receiver is used to control the encryption. Well-designed keys are almost impregnable. A key 16 characters long selected at random from 256 ASCII characters could take far longer than the 15-billion-year age of the universe to decode, assuming the perpetrator attempted 100 million different key combinations per second. Symmetric encryption requires the same key for both encryption and decryption. Asymmetric encryption, or public-key cryptography, requires a pair of keys, one for encryption and one for decryption. How to thank TFD for its existence? Tell a friend about us, add a link to this page, add the site to iGoogle, or visit webmaster's page for free fun content. |
|
| Encyclopedia |
| Free Tools: |
For surfers:
Free toolbar & extensions |
Word of the Day |
Help
For webmasters: Free content | Linking | Lookup box | Double-click lookup | Partner with us |
|---|