What is Cryptography ?

Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third party adversaries.

More generally, cryptography is about constructing and analyzing protocols that prevent third parties or the public from reading private messages.

Cryptography is both an Art and a Science.
Modern cryptography exists at the intersection of the disciplines of mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering, communication science, and physics.

Cryptography when spoken about in common tongue, is described as a mystical golden cloak of security that when donned on magically becomes secure.

This isn’t true.
Understanding cryptography to be a simple add on is a widely misconstrued conception.

Cryptography on its own is pretty much useless unless it’s part of a bigger use case. Cryptography when inculcated in the right way protects the integrity of the system and its key value points.

Security of a system is dependant on many factors apart from just cryptography such as architecture and dependencies.In some cases, even bad cryptography can be much better than the rest of the security system.

Cryptography is only truly useful if the rest of the system is also sufficiently secure against the attackers.

Cryptography is extremely important to get right, even in architectures that have other weaknesses.

This makes implementation of cryptography an extremely complicated and lengthy , but a necessary process.

We shall talk about “The weakest link property”subsequently which leads to understanding of the following phrase:

A security system is only as strong as its weakest link

We shall also talk of “trade-offs”, professional paranoia” and “Attack trees” as we progress.

Further articles can be found here

Cheers!