As you must already know, there are a ~plethora~ of operating systems in the world.

From the most simple to real time ones like QNX and so on. And even more exotic ones, I am sure.

However, most of the world can be divided into Windows, Unix and Mainframes. (ignore the Unix Flavours please)

The rest are all ~niche~ operating systems, used for very specific purposes, which may occasionally find space in the real world.

In the light of the above paragraph...

Just as there are zillions of operating systems, but only 3 worth really know as most of the world is on it, can I understand which cryptography ciphers are in ~MOST~ use today? The ones I can say cover up more than 95% of the cryptography ciphers today.

DSA, Blowfish, DES, RSA are the ones I can immedately think of (Triple DES, though there, is a variant of DES, hence not included)

Any assistance will be appreciated. This is because I am finding TOO MANY ciphers on the net to really focus myself.

Thank you.

...Have Phun

Hey aimless, from what I've seen used in applications I'll have to say RSA is the most popular among developers, also Elgamal is pretty popular. I've also seen DSA used but not as much as the above two.

Hope that helped any
goatass

Thank you.

Greetings aimless!

This is some ciphers that is widely used to encrypt data, and therefore worth a closer look:

Blowfish and Twofish, two block ciphers that has key dependent S-boxes.

TripleDES (3DES), uses DES three times, normally with three different, unrelated keys.
This makes it stronger than a single DES but also slower that
most new block ciphers.

Elliptic curve cryptosystems (ECC), not widely used,
but everybody knows them, so to say!

And as goatass said, RSA and Elgamal is also worth looking at.


However, I think that you should start by looking at RSA
and DES. This way you've studied both an asymmetric cipher and
a symmetric cipher.


regards
McCodEMaN

You should be aware of Rijndael, the new AES. It'll be most popular in most new applications.

Greetings Mike!

I agree this is something thats worth taking a closer look at!
In fact, I have a little program for encrypting files using the
Rijndael algorithm. It's only 84,1K so if anyone want it, let me know.

regards
McCodEMaN