The Interactive Glossary: Defining the Net
Cryptography
The process of securing private information that is passed through public networks by mathematically scrambling (encrypting) it in a way that makes it unreadable to anyone except the person or persons holding the mathematical "key" that can unscramble (decrypt) it. The two most common types of cryptography are "same-key" and "public-key." In same-key cryptography, a message is encrypted and decrypted using the same key, which is passed along from one party to another in a separate transmission. A more secure method is public-key cryptography which uses a pair of different keys (one public, one private) that have a particular relationship to one another, such that any message encrypted with one key can only be decrypted with the other key and vice versa.
