Wider use of authentication spurs the online economy and thus helps U.S. companies that do business online. Therefore, the U.S. government has encouraged use of authentication by leaving it free of all export restrictions and regulations. In this article I hope to show that parties can obtain confidentiality without using encryption. It is important to keep in mind the differences between confidentiality, encryption, and authentication. Confidentiality is the passing of information between two parties without a third party being able to understand it.
Encryption is the main way of achieving confidentiality using computers.
Encryption transforms a message into a ciphertext using an encryption key. The ciphertext can only be transformed back into the original message using the encryption key and therefore can only be read by someone who has the key. DES, RSA, and IDEA are examples of encryption schemes. Authentication is the process of verifying that a message was sent by a given person. This MAC is then appended to the message.