Easy approach to cryptography [Part 1]

Hello steemers!

A series of articles that start from a briefly approach to cryptography to some Blockchain development tutorials.

What is cryptography?
Is the action of writing in an enigmatic way, in a such way that the document can only be understood by the one who know how to decrypt it.

· Symmetric encryptión

How it works?

Symmetric key cryptography uses the a key to encryp a document or data and the same key to decrypt them.
Some of the common algorithms that uses symmertric key encryption are:

DES (Data Encryption Standard)

3DES

IDEA (International Data Encryption Algorithm)

BlowFish

AES (Rijndael)

A well-known example of symetric encryption is The Enigma machine used by the Nazi army during World War II.

The Enigma machine was an electromechanical cipher machine that generated alphabet based on the position of rollers that could have different orders and positions. Enigma used a symmetric method with an algorithm that depended on a key.

Here is a vídeo about how did it work:

Pros and cons o the symmetric encryptión

-Pros:
·It is very easy to use.
·It is fast and consumes less resources.

-Cons
·It is necessary to share the key
·It is vulnerable to brute force attacks
·Is hard to store, manage and protect a high number of keys.

To be continued … Next about asymmetric encryption