In this article, I will write a write-up for Cryptography Basics that covers the Importance of Cryptography, Plaintext to Ciphertext, Historical Ciphers, Types of Encryption and Basic Math in cryptography and symmetric encryption.
What is the standard required for handling credit card information?
PCI DSS
What do you call the encrypted plaintext?
ciphertext
What do you call the process that returns the plaintext?
decryption
Knowing that
XRPCTCRGNEI
was encrypted using Caesar Cipher, what is the original plaintext?ICANENCRYPT
At first, I thought we had to decode into the PLAINTEXT manually like shifting the letters several times backwards using the alphabet A-Z with the number 26 concept. Thinking we’ll have to change from ZYXABCD… to ABCD…Z or the VWXYZABC… with no success
Eventually, I realized that the question has a hint that one can “Can use an online tool such as the ones available at https://cryptii.com/pipes/caesar-cipher and https://www.dcode.fr/caesar-cipher”.
Having understood the concept of shifting the positions of the specific letters in the word we’re trying to find its Plaintext a few positions backward till you get an English word. Using Cryptii.com by default it shifts by 7 steps backward but if you move 11 steps backward you arrive to the word ICANENCRYPT
Should you trust DES? (Yea/Nay)
Nay
When was AES adopted as an encryption standard?
2001
What’s 1001 ⊕ 1010?
0011
What’s 118613842%9091?
356
What’s 60%12?
0
Thank you for reading my article. Please leave any questions or comments on improving my learning journey and the THM challenges. We can also connect more on LinkedIn or X.