Category: General

• Cryptographic Hash Functions

  

  2014-03-30 - Cryptographic Terminology, Cryptography, General, Security, Series

  Hash functions calculate a fixed length binary digest of a document. Read on to see what additional requirements turn an ordinary hash function into a cryptographic hash function and what use cases require the use of cryptographic hash functions.

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• Certificates and the Chain of Trust

  

  2014-03-28 - Cryptographic Terminology, Cryptography, General, Security, Series

  Certificates are containers for asymmetric encryption keys that can be used to establish a chain of trust between communicating parties. Read on to see how this works in practice.

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• The Allocation Unit

  

  2014-03-26 - DMVs & CVs, General, Series, SQL Server Internals, Storage Wednesday

  SQL Server groups all pages that belong to a single partition of a single index or heap into logical units. These units are called allocation units. Read on to learn about the different types of allocation units and discover how to identify the allocation units belonging to a table.

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• Asymmetric Key Encryption

  

  2014-03-24 - Cryptographic Terminology, Cryptography, General, Security, Series

  Asymmetric key encryption (aka public-key encryption) works with two separate keys, a public key to encrypt and a private key to decrypt. Read on to see the advantages and disadvantages of this type of encryption.

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• Symmetric Key Encryption

  

  2014-03-23 - Cryptographic Terminology, Cryptography, General, Security, Series

  A symmetric key encryption algorithm is a cryptographic algorithm the uses the same secret key for the encryption and the decryption step. Common examples include DES, RC4 and AES of which only AES can be recommended for use.

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