Secret key Algorithms in Cryptography

Divya Bandara
2 min readJul 27, 2020

In today’s cyber-world there’s an ever-present risk of unauthorized access to all or any sorts of data. To prevent data, we use security measures. Let’s now talk about some security methods using in cyber-world.

Symmetric key encryption

Symmetric encryption is a sort of encryption where just one key (a secret key) is employed to both encrypt and decrypt electronic information. The entities communicating via symmetric encryption must exchange the key in order that it are often utilized in the decryption process. This encryption method differs from asymmetric encryption where a pair of keys, one public and one private, is employed to encrypt and decrypt messages.

By using symmetric encryption algorithms, data is converted to a form that can’t be understood by anyone who doesn’t possess the key key to decrypt it. Once the intended recipient who possesses the key has the message, the algorithm reverses its action in order that the message is returned to its original and understandable form. the key key that the sender and recipient both use might be a selected password/code or it are often random string of letters or numbers that are generated by a secure random number generator (RNG).

Some examples of symmetric encryption algorithms include:

· AES (Advanced Encryption Standard)

· DES (Data Encryption Standard)

· RC4 (Rivest Cipher 4)

· RC5 (Rivest Cipher 5)

· RC6 (Rivest Cipher 6)

Where do we use symmetric encryption?

While symmetric encryption is an older method of encryption, it’s faster and more efficient than asymmetric encryption, which takes a toll on networks thanks to performance issues with data size and heavy CPU use. thanks to the higher performance and faster speed of symmetric encryption (compared to asymmetric), symmetric cryptography is usually used for bulk encryption / encrypting large amounts of knowledge , e.g. for database encryption. within the case of a database, the key key might only be available to the database itself to encrypt or decrypt.

Some samples of where symmetric cryptography is employed are:

· Payment applications, like card transactions where PII must be protected to stop fraud or fraudulent charges

· Validations to verify that the sender of a message is who he claims to be

· Random number generation or hashing

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