Cryptography

2.1. Cryptography#

Ensuring the confidentiality of data is now a basic requirement of computing. Cryptography underpins everything from sending secure messages to making online purchases. By the end of this module, you will appreciate how cryptography protects our digital activities and learn several foundational techniques.

2.1.1. Why Is Cryptography Important?#

  • Protecting Data: Prevents unauthorised parties from reading private information.

  • Verifying Authenticity: Ensures a message or file really comes from who it claims to.

  • Maintaining Integrity: Detects if any data is tampered with during transmission or storage.

2.1.2. What Will We Cover?#

  • Ciphers

    • The process of scrambling data so that is is unreadable

  • Modern Cryptography

    • Secure cryptographic ciphers that can’t be unscrambled

    • Both symmetric and asymmetric encryption

  • Hashing

    • One-way cryptographic functions that we will use in later modules

2.1.3. Looking Ahead#

In later modules we will apply these fundamental cryptographic techniques to secure the web and our applications.