This past week we have been learning about how encryption and decryption works. I have never learned about this before, and I have been really intrigued about how this all works out. We have studied matrices, RSA, and Key Sharing. And of course, there are many more that I am going to explore as well.

One method I have started to research is Twofish. Twofish is a symmetric block cipher, where a single key is used for encryption and decryption. It has a block size of 128 bits and accepts a key of any length up to 256 bits. One thing that is great about it, is that it’s flexible. It can be used in network applications where keys are changed frequently and in applications where there is little or no RAM and ROM available.

This diagram shows how Twofish works. It looks kinda crazy but, nothing is in Twofish by chance. Anything in the algorithm that they couldn’t justify, they removed. The result is a lean, mean algorithm that is strong and conceptually simple.

Another method I have read a little bit about is Data Encryption Standard or DES. It has been around since 1975 and is not used as much anymore because of how easy it is to hack. While there are no known severe weaknesses in its internals, it is inherently flawed because its 56-bit key is too short… A German court recently declared DES to be “out-of-date and not secure enough.” DES is a block cipher and encrypts data in blocks of size of 64 bits each, which means 64 bits of plain text goes as the input to DES, which produces 64 bits of ciphertext. The same algorithm is used for encryption and decryption, with very minor differences. However, the key length is 56 bits.

The last method I researched is Advanced Encryption Standard or AES. It is a specification of electronic data established by the U.S National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2001. Unlike DES, AES is more largely used today and is much stronger. AES is also a block cipher and the key size can be 128/192/256 bits. However, it encrypts data in blocks of 128. This means that it takes 128 bits as input and outputs 128 bits of encrypted ciphertext as output.

Starting off with matrices. Matrices are an arrangement of rows and columns, which is used to represent a mathematical object or a property of such an object. As you can use them in math, they also are very useful in encoding messages. We learned how to create them with a key so that we could send different messages to people without others knowing what we were saying.

RSA is another way of keeping your data safe. We learned how it works and how it is number-based. A very low-key way of describing RSA is if you have two big prime numbers, that makes it very hard for a computer to computer, which is how they created RSA security. Basically, if you wanted to send a message using RSA, you would encrypt a message using a big prime, then decrypt it using big prime 2,