7 – Securing Communications

Publisher Summary An understanding of the fundamental characteristics of both cryptography and steganography allows the security administrator or manager to gauge the methods implemented in tools such as firewalls and virtual private networks better and provide enough understanding to make better decisions. Cryptography is the art of devising codes and ciphers. Cryptanalysis is the art of breaking those very codes and ciphers. Cryptology is a combination of the two arts. Information to be encrypted is known as plain text; the result of that process yields cipher text. The various parameters of the encryption process that transforms plain text to cipher text are generally referred to as keys. Steganography's purpose is to hide the existence of the message, whereas cryptography encodes a message so that it cannot be understood. Steganography is becoming more popular because of current industry demands for digital watermarking and fingerprinting of audio and video files.