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Cryptography is one of those topics that many people get antsy over, especially politicians. Several years ago in the US, a special encryption chip by the name of Clipper was proposed. Essentially, Clipper was a key escrow encryption system designed

Cryptography is one of those topics that many people get antsy over, especially politicians. Several years ago in the US, a special encryption chip by the name of Clipper was proposed. Essentially, Clipper was a key escrow encryption system designed to let individuals and corporations communicate securely, while at the same time enabling US law enforcement agencies to access the content of said communications on an as-needed basis.

While Clipper was supported by several US organisations including the NSA (who developed the chip's Skipjack encryption algorithm) and NIST, public support failed to materialise. In fact, public objection to Clipper use was so strong that plans to mandate its use were eventually shelved.

The debate over publicly available strong crypto continues today. Many individuals, corporations and government agencies see widely available strong crypto as only being useful to criminals. However, others (most notably privacy organisations) see the wide availability of strong encryption vital to online privacy and the maintenance of freedom.

Today, the strongest forms of cryptography are based on Public Key Infrastructure and number factoring. The most popular product to use these methods is the now discontinued PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). Despite this product no longer being available, there are free alternatives such as GPG that will do the same job. As both PGP (in its latter incarnations) and GPG implement the OpenPGP standard, they're essentially compatible.

Cryptography and encryption is an extremely interesting field. However, before you can get into and understand the technical details of encryption algorithms such as DES/3DES, Blowfish, Twofish, IDEA and RSA, you really should understand the basics of how encryption works.

AntiCrack has posted an interesting article covering the basics of encryption. Suitable for those totally new to the techniques behind encryption, the article serves as a nice primer in the subject and should, hopefully, get you all interested in learning more about Cryptography.

If you find encryption isn't your thing and you'd rather read something funny, or perhaps check out an example of cool, whacked-out Web design, see here and here.

Enjoy!