Network Security Approaches in Distributed Environment

Introduction

Cryptology is defined from Greek word kryptós and lógos which means hidden word. Cryptography and Cryptanalysis is an amalgamation of cryptology. The art of hiding the readable data (according to the perception of a human being) into a non-readable format is known as cryptography. Cryptanalysis is the opposite of cryptography, where it converts the non-readable data into readable form, without knowing the algorithm of encryption. The word cryptography is originated from the Greek word “kryptós”, which means the art of writing or solving codes secretly. The first citation of the cryptography technique was in the form of hieroglyphics, dated back to 1900 B.C, that is during the time of Egyptian. In the year 1799, a French soldier found a black basalt slab, which was inscribed with the ancient script. The stone was in the form of irregular shape which contains three different types of scripts (i) Greek, (ii) Egyptian hieroglyphics, and (iii) Egyptian demotic. In the year 1790-1832, Jean-Francois Champollion was the first person who cracked the hieroglyphics code by using a Greek guide. Since the year 1802, the Rosetta stone has been kept in the British Museum, London. Modern day’s cryptography is very different from ancient cryptography. Now the encryption algorithm is very complicated and require huge computational time. Cryptography algorithm uses the number of shift rounds and XOR operation for decipherment. Due to the advancement in computing power, the future cryptographic algorithm works on quantum computation speed allowing use of large key size. The DNA cryptography is one of the kind of cryptographic technique which uses the perplexing genetic data for hiding and improve the genetic secrecy in the sequencing process. The term cryptology is offend used in the field of data transmission and storage.