Cipher

A cipher may be defined as a collection of techniques used to conceal the readability and meaning of text, a method more commonly known as encryption. Aside from its cryptographic definition, cipher also refers to an unimportant individual or a mixture of symbols found with an entwined weaving of letters in a monogram. Some ciphers function simply by realigning a sequence or representation of numbers and letters. For instance, B may be represented by F - D represented by C and so on. To provide a greater level of efficiency, most ciphers use a cryptographic key in conjunction with a specific algorithm. A stream cipher uses an algorithm that applies a key to each individual bit - a block cipher breaks the data message down into fragments. It then adds a key with each fragment. Block ciphers are the most modern approach, using a length of 64-bits to encrypt data.