This centaury stands on the edge of new modern methods of attacks and advancement in the speed of computation, which taken over the best known secure secret-key algorithm such as DES, Digital Encryption Standard conquered the world of cryptography for centuries. A 40 bit version of the DES algorithm can be easily cracked by any modern computer and a 56 bit can be broken by any cheaply available Super Computer or by a simple beo-wulf cluster. That poses a security threat and people have developed, developing various other algorithms like 3DES also known as Triple DES etc, The NIST and NSA plays an important role in deciding the algorithms. They analyze and recommend the algorithm for usage.

The latest trends have opened for the AES Advanced Encryptions Standards and many algorithms have been submitted for the review. Some of them approved and under analysis. They are IDEA, RC5, RC6 Rjindael, MARS, Two-fish, Blowfish, Diamond, Sapphire etc. The inventions grow as the need increases. As per the truth, the importance of cryptography as given has a big response from scientific and legal bodies. Today, by the invention of high speed machines and high bandwidth transmission rates, people are planning to go further. The famous formula of energy mass relationship by Einstein e=mc2 has stepped into cryptography also. The Japanese have undertaken the improvement and implementation of quantum cryptography which uses the properties of the atoms and its inner particles for data integrity, which off course has a long way to go. The first commercially available quantum-cryptographic product is expected to be release
around 2040. In the future versions of this draft, we will go in more details about platform and operating system specific measures that can be carried to protect, various products that are available for each platoforms. More on snake-oil algorithms, choosing of secure products, various advanced cryptoanalytic methods, and details about steganography – the other facet of cryptography which uses the commonly available formats like gifs, jpegs, wavs, bmps file formats to hide secret data and retrieve them without affecting the quality of the used format.

What is Cryptography?