Interested in the inner working of cryptographic tools? Mike Bedford provides a hands-on introduction to the technology of cryptography.
Cryptography – rendering a message or data unintelligible to any unauthorised party – is commonly used to protect data on a hard disk in the case of loss or theft, or to obfuscate data that’s transmitted online.
It’s a vital tool in everyday activities such as online banking, where it works behind the scenes, and you may well use encryption tools on your PC. Here we put cryptography under the spotlight. However, this isn’t a guide on how to use cryptographic tools for real-world applications. Instead, because the underlying technology is a mystery to many, we aim to help you to understand the principles and see how today’s ciphers came about.
To guide you in this voyage of discovery, we’ll use some excellent open source software that will give you hands-on experience, and we’ll also suggest some exercises that you could undertake by hacking your own code. Our software of choice, JCrypTool, is a valuable educational resource, and we’ll illustrate some of the ciphers we discuss by reference to this software. However, that’s only scratching the surface of its capabilities so, if you want to learn more about this fascinating subject, we suggest you delve further into JCrypTool yourself.
Note that this article is intended to inform you, not to provide practical guidance on real-world cryptography. So, while we encourage you to try out ideas with your own code, we don’t recommend that you use your code to protect your most valuable secrets. Mistakes won’t always be obvious and the risk of getting it wrong is just too great. Furthermore, if you have a real need for encryption, we recommend that you read several impartial reviews before making your choice. And finally, before getting bogged down in unfamiliar terminology, we suggest you get up to date on the language of cryptography by looking at the box just over there…
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Denne historien er fra March 2019-utgaven av Linux Format.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Create your first WebSocket service
Mihalis Tsoukalos explains how to use the Go programming language to work with the WebSocket protocol.
Fantastic Mr Firefox
Nick Peers takes a trip down memory lane to reveal the story behind the rise - and slight fall - of Mozilla's popular web browser.
Set up your terminal and email like it's 1983
Jump in the hot terminal time machine with Mats Tage Axelsson who emails from the command line using the latest technology.
Universal layer text effects with GIMP
Posters use them, films and presentations are hard to imagine without them: text effects. Attract attention with Karsten Günther and GIMP.
Jump to a federated social network
Nick Peers reveals how you can get up and running with this free, decentralised and non-profit alternative to Twitter.
Free our SOFTWARE!
Taking anything for granted is dangerous, so Jonni Bidwell and Mike Saunders revisit how the free software movement got started to help free us from proprietary tyranny!
Master RPI.GPIO
Les Pounder goes back to the early days of the Raspberry Pi - and his career with this classic library! -
Waveshare Zero to Pi3
Transform your Pi Zero into a Pi 3, they promised Les Pounder, but it's more like adding on go-faster stripes.
The Best OPEN SOURCE Software Ever!
In an attempt to trigger controversy, Michael Reed and Neil Mohr unequivocally state these are the greatest free software apps ever. Probably. We’re just trying to be helpful.
Linux-Mandrake 7
Simplicity and a wide range of applications make this a great distribution for all Linux users.