Cryptography plays a pivotal role in these standard solutions. This technology white paper discusses the motivations, protocols, and product offerings for deploying cryptographic technology throughout the enterprise and over the public Internet. There are many challenges in building a full-service intranet that provides safe communications and collaboration. These standards provide the foundation for a wide variety of security services, including encryption, message integrity verification, authentication, and digital signatures. In the next section, we provide a quick overview of cryptography as well as references for further reading.
Encryption transforms data into some unreadable form to ensure privacy.
Authentication identifies an entity such as an individual, a machine on the network, or an organization. Digital signatures bind a document to the possessor of a particular key and are the digital equivalent of paper signatures. All of these technologies make use of sophisticated mathematical techniques. For more information on cryptography, please see RSA's Frequently Asked Questions . The problem with symmetric-key cryptography is having the sender and receiver agree on a secret key without anyone else finding out.