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cryptography
From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
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English
Etymology
Pronunciation
Noun
cryptography (usually uncountable, plural cryptographies)
- The discipline that embodies the principles, means, and methods for transforming data to hide its semantic content, prevent unauthorized use, or detect modifications, while also ensuring information security through confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and nonrepudiation.
- Holonym: cryptology
- Comeronym: cryptanalysis
- 1658, Sir Thomas Browne (first use in English):
- We might abate...the strange cryptography of Gaffarell in his Starrie Booke of Heaven.
- 2011 November 23, Benjamin Wallace, “The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin”, in Wired, San Francisco, Calif.: Condé Nast Publications, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 2 January 2025:
- [A] man named Satoshi Nakamoto posted a research paper to an obscure cryptography listserv describing his design for a new digital currency that he called bitcoin.
Usage notes
- Subfields include encoding, decoding, cryptanalysis, codes, ciphers, etc.
- In many languages, though less so in English, cognates to cryptology are also used with the meaning given above, and even preferred.
- Related to cryptography but distinct, steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no-one apart from the sender and intended recipient even realizes there is a hidden message.
Derived terms
Related terms
Translations
discipline concerned with communication security
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See also
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