In the last few decades the science and study of cryptography has earned an outstanding reputation due to its insane applicability and efficiency. Cryptography is the science of message secrecy. Its importance is easily explicable -- it is used everywhere: online purchasing, secured money transfers, cellular phones, broadcast of TV channels, emails, confidential data, and so forth. Our life would be quite different without cryptography.
This is the first article of a multi-part series. It serves the purpose of introducing you to cryptography. I cannot promise an easy ride through this journey, but it will be a comprehensible and amazing one. As much as we'll get into this, we'll realize how complex cryptography can be. But that shouldn't scare you away. I start by assuming that the reader has no experience with cryptography but has a bit of coding experience.
If that doesn't describe you, it's not a problem per se. You can skip the code parts and still understand the rest of the series. So let's move on — we have no time to waste!
What Will I Learn Reading This Series?
By reading this multi-part article series, you should become familiar with cryptography. We will get into a brief explanation of the whole process before moving on to real-life examples. Then we will venture into the coding of several quick-and-easy encryption and decryption algorithms in ANSI C. Therefore, you will be able to see its results with your own eyes. We learn the best by doing it!
As a closure to the series I will try to challenge you to study cryptography. Hopefully, I might spark and bring to life some of those hidden desires. You will find a few of the most influential and best literature on cryptography as further reading and reference at the epilogue of this series. You will also get to know the latest algorithms that are currently used in various areas. Of course, their complexity is unimaginable compared to the ones we will code in C.
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