Identity & Access Management|Password Encryption/Decryption/Hashing

Identity & Access Management|Password Encryption/Decryption/Hashing Registration Encryption Hashing Password Verification 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.