The basis for many types of secure transmission over the Internet, cryptography is a constantly changing and evolving field of mathematics that on the Internet refers to the practice of encrypting data for safe transmission. Regular data is coded into a cipher (which looks like scrambled text) then transmitted and deciphered by the receiving party.

Reference Encryption: Encryption is a form of cryptography that uses a mathematical algorithm to scramble data for security purposes. Encrypted data is generated by algorithms stored in keys. The keys are kept by the sending and receiving parties in any encrypted transmission. An encrypted message is impossible to read without access to the correct key. There are many different flavors of algorithmic encryption, including Blowfish, TEA, and PGP.