Master Symmetric Cryptography: Key Concepts & Techniques 🔐

Symmetric encryption, also referred to as conventional encryption or single-key encryption. A symmetric encryption scheme has five ingredients: Plaintext: This is the original message or data that is fed into the algorithm as input. Encryption algorithm: The encryption algorithm performs various substitutions and transformations on the plaintext. Secret key: The secret key is also input to the encryption algorithm. The exact substitutions and transformations performed by the algorithm depend on the key. Ciphertext: This is the scrambled message produced as output. It depends on the plaintext and the secret key. For a given message, two different keys will produce two different ciphertexts. Decryption algorithm: This is essentially the encryption algorithm run in reverse. It takes the ciphertext and the secret key and produces the original plaintext.