Crypto jargon
In this chapter, I will be using information security industry terms to refer to things. It's probably best I gave a quick explanation as follows:
- Encoding is taking input and outputting it in another form. The process is entirely reversible.
- Encryption is taking input and making it entirely unreadable. Without extra information, even the knowledge of an encryption algorithm is useless.
- Hashing is taking input and creating a fixed, non-reversible value for the purposes of comparison. The idea is that if a database is compromised, only the hashed values are lost.
- A substitution cipher is a primitive form of encoding that replaces characters with fixed values. This can be through a variety of methods, the most of common of which is a straight substitution where symbols or characters are used in lieu of standard western letters.
- A transposition cipher is another primitive form of encoding where characters are shifted through the alphabet to take on different characters. For...
