Ultimate Guide to Password Encryption, Hashing, and Access Management 🔐

Identity & Access Management|Password Encryption/Decryption/Hashing

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What is Encryption?
Encryption is the process of converting human-readable plaintext to incomprehensible text, also known as cipher text.
What is key in cryptography?
A cryptographic key is a string of characters used within an encryption algorithm for altering data so that the data appears random. Like a physical key, it locks(encrypts) data so that only someone with the right key can unlock(decrypt) it.
Types of encryption:
Symmetric: Uses a shared Key
Asymmetric: Uses a pair of keys (public & private)
Encryption Algorithms


Triple DES - Triple Data Encryption Standard (DES) algorithm.
- Applies DES cipher algorithm three times to each data block.
- Uses 3 individual keys with 56 bits each.
- Slowly being phased out, but still is a dependable hardware encryption solution used primarily by financial services.


RSA - Asymmetric (public-key encryption) algorithm.
- Standard for transmitting data over the internet.


Blowfish
- Symmetric-key algorithm
- Intended as alternative to DES
- Splits messages into blocks of 64 bits and encrypts them individually
- Known for tremendous speed and overall effectiveness.


Twofish
- Successor to Blowfish
- Key length can be up-to 256 bits
- Like blowfish, twofish is freely available in the public domainAES -


Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) established by US National Institute of Standards and Technology -
Key Length of 128 bit is extremely efficient, 192 and 256 bits are also used for heavy duty encryption
- Trusted as standard by US Government and numerous organizations.

Hashing

Hashing is the process of converting a given input into an output of a specific number of bytes


Hashing Algorithms
MD5
- Fifth version of the Message Digest algorithm
- Creates 128-bit outputs.
- Slowly being phased out, due to the inherent weakness of Collisions.


SHA-1
- Second version of Secure Hashing Algorithm, SHA-0 being the first. - Creates 160-bit outputs.
SHA-2
- Suite of hashing algorithms
- Contains SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512
- Each algorithm is represented by the bit-length of the output


SHA-3 - Released in 2015, SHA3 is the latest version of SHA family of algorithms released by NIST.
- Internal Structure is different from the MD5-like structure of SHA-1 and SHA-2
- Based on the Keccak cryptographic function.
- The Keccak function consists of a structure that uses sponge construction, which represents a class of algorithm that takes an input bit stream of any length to produce an output stream of any desired length.