Cryptography: A security pillar of privacy, integrity and authenticity of data communication

This paper seeks to advance research and strategies that lead to a heightened awareness of the need to protect data from disclosure, to guarantee the authenticity of data and messages, and to protect systems from network‐based attacks.

The paper introduces the necessary mathematics of cryptography: integer and modular arithmetic, linear congruence, Euclidean and extended Euclidean algorithm, Fermat's theorem, and Elliptic curve.

The results indicate that encryption has expanded beyond confidentiality concerns to include techniques for message integrity checking, sender/receiver identity authentication, digital signatures, interactive proofs, and secure computation.

The results of this research show that all forms of e‐commerce activities such as online credit card processing, purchasing stocks, and banking data processing, if compromised, would lead to businesses losing billions of dollars in lost revenues as well as losing confidence in e‐commerce. In the last few years, it had been reported that organizations that store and maintain customers' private and confidential records were compromised on many occasions by hackers breaking into the data networks and stealing the records from the storage media.

This paper tackles one of the most critical problems of securing data networks. Security problems arise among other things to resource and workload sharing; complexity of interconnected networks; authentication of users; fast expandability of networks; threats to networks such as wiretapping and violations of the seven pillars of security: authentication, authorization, privacy, integrity, non‐repudiation, availability, and audit.