Bank s, financial institution s and the US government have been using encryption technology for years, but not until recently has the technology been available to everyone. With intellectual capital the creator of wealth in the 90 s, it is imperative for companies to protect themselves from threats of misuse, abuse or theft of their sensitive information. Cryptography comes from the Greek words hidden or secret and writing. Thus, cryptography is the art of secret writing. The basic service provided by cryptography is the ability to send information between participants in a way that prevents others from reading it.
Cryptographic systems tend to involve both an algorithm and a secret value.
The secret value is known as the key. The reason for having a key in addition to algorithm is that it is difficult to keep devising new algorithms that will allow reversible scrambling of information, and it is difficult to quickly explain a newly devised algorithm to the person with whom you would like to start communicating securely. The concept of a key is analogous to the combination for a combination lock. You dial in the secret numbers in the correct sequence and the lock opens, you can t open a combination lock without knowing the combination. Today there are both hardware devices and software packages available for encrypting users data files, hard drives and E-mail messages.