Cryptography: Part 1 - Why Cryptography?

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»Cryptography: Part 1 - Why Cryptography?

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Cryptography, the science of analyzing and deciphering codes and ciphers and cryptograms. This is the introduction of a multi-article discussion on encrpytion.

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Good quick and dirty primer on basic encryption techniques.

In your upcoming articles, are you going to discuss any of the following:

- Recommended software to perform these tasks
- Hardware dongles (USB dongles, swipe cards, etc), bioscanner devices (Fingerprint, retinal, etc), other devices that can be used to unique static information that can be used as a key
- Rotation schemes and updating of keys to provide for higher level of security incase of key breaches
- HOWTO on discovering what technique was used to encrypt information by looking at the encrypted data

I would be interested in reading about some high-level (256bit and above) encryption for a variety of filesystems for Mac, Linux and Windows systems that is integrated with some type of scanner device or hardware dongle. Ideally it would provide maximum security for a machine which may be physically compromised while maintaining complete data security.