Cryptography-a state of the art review

Cryptography is the only known practical method for protecting information transmitted through potentially hostile environments, where it is either impossible or impractical to protect the information by conventional physical means. Also, damage resulting from message alteration, message insertion, and message deletion can be avoided. Administrative and physical security procedures often can provide adequate protection for offline data transport and storage. However, where file security methods are either nonexistent or weak, encryption may provide the most effective and economical protection. The authors gives an overview of cryptographic methods using symmetric and asymmetric algorithms and demonstrates why future cryptographic applications should use a hybrid approach, i.e., combination of symmetric and asymmetric (public key) methods