Glossary of Security Terms: Key

A key is a piece of information used by a cipher for encryption and/or decryption. Encrypted messages should remain secure even if everything about the cryptosystem, except for the key, is public knowledge.

In symmetric-key cryptography, the same key is used for both encryption and decryption. In public-key cryptography, there exists a pair of related keys known as the public key and private key. The public key is freely available, whereas the private key is kept secret. The public key is able to encrypt messages that only the corresponding private key is able to decrypt, and vice versa.

View Previous Terms:

• Block cipher mode of operation
• Certificate authority
• Challenge-response authentication
• Cipher
• Cipher suite
• Ciphertext
• CORS
• CORS-safelisted request header
• CORS-safelisted response header
• Cross-site scripting
• Cryptanalysis
• Cryptographic hash function
• Cryptography
• CSP
• CSRF
• Decryption
• Digital certificate
• DTLS (Datagram Transport Layer Security)
• Encryption
• Forbidden header name
• Forbidden response header name
• Hash
• HMAC
• HPKP
• HSTS
• HTTPS
• MitM
• OWASP
• Preflight request
• Public-key cryptography
• Reporting directive
• Robots.txt
• Same-origin policy
• Session Hijacking
• SQL Injection
• Symmetric-key cryptography
• TOFU
• Transport Layer Security (TLS)

Credits

• Source: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Key
• Published under Open CC Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license