Let's go over some of the popular symmetric encryption algorithms. These include DES, 3DES, IDEA, and AES. Like most things in cryptography, you are going to see a lot of acronyms.DES stands for Digital Encryption Standard. It is a block cipher with a 56 bit key. The algorithm goes through 16 rounds to get the final data.
3DES stands for Triple DES. You can probably guess that it is three times as strong as plain DES. It uses three different 56-bit keys for encryption.
IDEA is the International Data Encryption Algorithm. IDEA is part of PGP. It uses a 128 bit encryption key.
Finally AES is the Advanced Encryption Standard. AES uses the Rijndal algorithm. It is named after the two creators of the algorithm. You pronounce it rhine-doll.
Next time I am going to start up with asymmetric keys.
