Cryptography

Cryptography is a technique that converts plain text into an encrypted text. It is challenging for a third party to change the data while using cryptography.

Cryptography ensures

Security of the network
Transparency in transactions
Privacy of the individual users

Why cryptography in Blockchain?

The term “cryptography” refers to much more than simply the encryption and decoding process.

Cryptography is useful for

Creating a digital signature: A mathematical formula that verifies the legitimacy of an electronic communication
Dividing a complex message into simpler ones or doing even more sophisticated things

Cryptography view on the Blockchain

As you are aware, every transaction in a blockchain is spread around nodes in a peer-to-peer manner so that no one can identify the transaction’s original source. In order to fully safeguard it, blockchain requires sophisticated level encryption.

Types of Cryptography

a) Symmetric
b) Asymmetric

There are fundamentally two types of cryptography

Symmetric Cryptography

This method uses only one mutually agreed upon ‘private key’ (secret key) by the sender and the receiver, both to encrypt and to decrypt the data.
Even though this process is faster, it is easily hackable

Asymmetric Cryptography

This method uses a pair of Public key and private key.
This public key is distributed amongst all the users in the network while each user has their own private key (secret key)

Algorithms in Asymmetric Cryptography

Cryptography uses a complex algorithm for secure transmission of messages over the network.
Asymmetric cryptography primarily uses two types of algorithms

Sign-Verify
Encrypt-Decrypt

Sign and Verify algorithms uses the concept of hashing

What is Hashing?

Hashing is an algorithm that encrypts data of any arbitrary length to a fixed length.

This fixed length output is a smaller representation of the original data and is called Digest or Hashing
Hashes can be used validate the data that came from as each digest is uniquely tied to the original message

#Asymmetric Cryptography #Cryptography #Symmetric Cryptography

Cryptography in Blockchain