Secret key Algorithms in Cryptography

In this article, we are going to talk about secret key algorithm: symmetric key cryptography.

What is secret key algorithm?

Symmetric encryption is a type of encryption where only one key (a secret key) is used to both encrypt and decrypt electronic information. That means if I encrypt a message and I have the key. I want to send it to a person called A. Then A should have the key to decrypt the message. There fore; the entities communicating via symmetric encryption must exchange the key so that it can be used in the decryption process.

By using symmetric encryption algorithms, data is converted to a form that cannot be understood by anyone who does not possess the secret key to decrypt it. Once the intended recipient who possesses the key has the message, the algorithm reverses its action so that the message is returned to its original and understandable form. The secret key that the sender and recipient both use could be a specific characters that have been generated by a secure random number generator (RNG).

Here the some of examples for secret key algorithm.

• AES (Advanced Encryption Standard)
• DES (Data Encryption Standard)
• IDEA (International Data Encryption Algorithm)
• Blowfish (Drop-in replacement for DES or IDEA)

Why we need this?

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

This is about the secret key algorithm…