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A cipher suite is a combination of a key exchange algorithm, authentication method, bulk encryption cipher, and message authentication code. In a cryptosystem like TLS, the client and server must agree on a cipher suite before they can begin communicating securely. A typical cipher suite looks like ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 or ECDhe-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256, indicating:ECDHE (elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman ephemeral) for key exchange, RSA for authentication, AES-128 as the cipher, with Galois/Counter Mode (GCM) as the block cipher mode of operation.