A symmetric encryption scheme has five ingredients:-
- Plaintext
- Encryption algorithm
- Secret key
- Ciphertext
- Decryption Algorithm
- Plaintext: This is the original intangible message or data that is fed into the algorithm as input.
- Encryption algorithm: The encryption algorithm performs various substitu- tions and transformations on the plaintext.
- Secret key: The secret key is also input to the encryption algorithm. The key is a value independent of the plaintext and of the algorithm. The algorithm will produce a different output depending on the specific key being used at the time. The exact substitutions and transformations performed by the algorithm depend on the key.
- Ciphertext: This is the scrambled message produced as output. It depends on the plaintext and the secret key. For a given message, two different keys will produce two different ciphertexts. The ciphertext is an apparently random stream of data and, as it stands, is unintelligible.
- Decryption algorithm: This is essentially the encryption algorithm run in reverse. It takes the ciphertext and the secret key and produces the original plaintext.

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