The art or science encompassing the principles and methods of transforming an intelligible message into one that is unintelligible, and then re-transforming that message back to its original form.
Plaintext The original intelligible message.
Cipher text The transformed message Cipher An algorithm for transforming an intelligible message into one that is unintelligible by transposition and/or substitution methods.
Key Some critical information used by the cipher, known only to the sender& receiver.
Encipher (encode) The process of converting plaintext to cipher text using a cipher and a key.
Decipher (decode) the process of converting cipher text back into plaintext using a cipher and a key.
Cryptanalysis The study of principles and methods of transforming an unintelligible message back into an intelligible message without knowledge of the key. Also called code breaking.
Cryptology Both cryptography and cryptanalysis.
Code An algorithm for transforming an intelligible message into an unintelligible one using a code-book Cryptograph.