By Kenneth Ulrich Cryptography is an inherently difficult topic to discuss because information about cryptography often seems to be in code. To reveal truth about concealment, one must decipher strange language at every turn. This phenomenon is manifest in the debate over the Clinton administration's recent technological proposal, a digital encryption device called the Clipper Chip. It's tempting to ignore the whole issue rather than storm its intellectual battlements. The war of the Clipper chip is currently raging over a battlefield so narrow with special interest, so muddy with jargon, that the vast majority of the citizens it will affect have been excluded from combat.
Few people realize that the debate actually pertains to everyone.
The ciphertext is then transmitted to some other party, who employs a decryption key to change the ciphertext back into plaintext. This is called a single-key system. I send the message. If it is intercepted, it will be unreadable unless the third party can somehow deduce my encryption key through code-cracking techniques. The key will also prevent a third party from authoring a message in my name.