Cryptography Basics
Fundamental cryptographic concepts.
The core concepts of applied cryptography: symmetric and asymmetric encryption, hashes, signatures, PKI and cipher types, with the supporting ideas of nonces, salts, key derivation, forward secrecy and authenticated encryption that decide whether those primitives are used safely.
Use it when
- You need a precise one-line definition of a cryptographic term.
- You are checking whether a design uses salts, nonces and key derivation correctly.
Watch out for
- Definitions here are conceptual. Secure use depends on correct implementation, parameter choice and key management.
- Terms are sometimes used loosely in practice (for example 'encryption' for hashing); the entries use the strict meaning.
The data
16 rows
| Term | Description |
|---|---|
| Symmetric Encryption | Same key is used for encryption and decryption. |
| Asymmetric Encryption | Public and private key pair used for encryption and signing. |
| Hash Function | One-way function producing a fixed-size digest. |
| Digital Signature | Uses a private key to sign and a public key to verify. |
| Public Key Infrastructure | Framework for managing public-key certificates. |
| Block Cipher | Encrypts fixed-length blocks of plaintext. |
| Stream Cipher | Encrypts data one bit or byte at a time. |
| Nonce / IV | A value used once per encryption under a key so that identical plaintexts produce different ciphertexts; reusing it can be catastrophic. |
| Salt | A random per-item value mixed into a password hash so identical passwords hash differently and precomputed tables fail. |
| Key Derivation Function | A function that derives one or more keys from a secret or password, often deliberately slow for passwords. |
| Perfect Forward Secrecy | A property where compromise of long-term keys does not reveal past session keys, achieved with ephemeral key exchange. |
| Authenticated Encryption (AEAD) | Encryption that also proves the ciphertext and associated data have not been altered. |
| Certificate Authority | A trusted party that signs certificates binding a public key to an identity. |
| Entropy | A measure of unpredictability. Keys and tokens must come from a cryptographically secure random source. |
| Kerckhoffs's Principle | A system should remain secure even if everything except the key is public. |
| Collision Resistance | The property that it is computationally infeasible to find two different inputs with the same hash. |
Fields
The shape of this dataset, read from the data itself: every column, its type and a real value. Agents can use this to plan a query without fetching the whole document.
| Section | Field | Type | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| data | term | string | Symmetric Encryption |
| data | description | string | Same key is used for encryption and decryption. |
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