In cryptography, encryption is the process

of obscuring information to make it unreadable without

special knowledge.

The fundamental objective of

cryptography is to enable two people, usually referred to
as Alice and Bob, to communicate over an insecure
channel in such a way that an opponent, Oscar, cannot
understand what is being said.
1- RSA algorithm is an asymmetric algorithm and plays a key role in
public key cryptography. It is widely used in electronic commerce
protocols. The algorithm was described in 1977 by Ron Rivest, Adi
Shamir and Len Adleman who were all at MIT at the time; the letters
RSA are the initials of their surnames. Clifford Cocks, a British
mathematician working for GCHQ, described an equivalent system in an
internal document in 1973. His discovery, however, was not revealed
until 1997 due to its top-secret classification.The algorithm was
patented by MIT in 1983.
2- ElGamal encryption system is an asymmetric key encryption
algorithm for public-key cryptography which is based on
the Diffie–Hellman key exchange. The system provides an
additional layer of security by asymmetrically encrypting keys
previously used for symmetric message encryption. It was
described by Taher Elgamal in 1985. ElGamal encryption is used
in the free GNU Privacy Guard software, recent versions of PGP,
and other cryptosystems. The Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA)
is a variant of the ElGamal signature scheme, which should not
be confused with ElGamal encryption.
3-XTR is an algorithm for public-key encryption. XTR stands for
'ECSTR', which is an abbreviation for Efficient and Compact
Subgroup Trace Representation. It is a method to represent
elements of a subgroup of a multiplicative group of a finite field.

4- Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm or ECDSA is a

cryptographic algorithm used by Bitcoin to ensure that funds can
only be spent by their rightful owners. A few concepts related
to ECDSA: private key: A secret number, known only to the
person that generated it.

5- Diffie–Hellman key exchange (DH) is a method of securely

exchanging cryptographic keys over a public channel and was
one of the first public-key protocols as originally conceptualized
by Ralph Merkle and named after Whitfield Diffie and Martin
Hellman.[1][2] DH is one of the earliest practical examples of
public key exchange implemented within the field of cryptography.

6- Rabin cryptosystem is an
asymmetric cryptographic technique, whose security, like that
of RSA, is related to the difficulty of factorization. However the
Rabin cryptosystem has the advantage that the problem on which
it relies has been proved to be as hard as integer factorization,
which is not currently known to be true of the RSA problem. It has
the disadvantage that each output of the Rabin function can be
generated by any of four possible inputs; if each output is a
ciphertext, extra complexity is required on decryption to identify
which of the four possible inputs was the true plaintext.
Conclusions Cryptography is an interdisciplinary
subject, drawing from several fields. Before the time of
computers, it was closely related to linguistics. Nowadays
the emphasis has shifted, and cryptography makes
extensive use of technical areas of mathematics,
especially those areas collectively known as discrete
mathematics. This includes topics from number theory,
information theory, computational complexity, statistics
and combinatorics. The security of all practical
encryption schemes remains unproven, both for
symmetric and asymmetric schemes. For symmetric
ciphers, confidence gained in an algorithm is usually
anecdotal — e.g. no successful attack has been reported
on an algorithm for several years despite intensive
analysis. Such a cipher might also have provable security
against a limited class of attacks. For asymmetric
schemes, it is common to rely on the difficulty of the
associated mathematical problem, but this, too, is not
provably secure. Surprisingly, it is proven that
cryptography has only one secure cipher: the one-time
pad. However, it requires keys (at least) as long as the
plaintext, so it was almost always too cumbersome to
use.
References [1] Douglas Stinson, “Cryptography: Theory and
Practice”, CRC Press, 1995 [2] W. Alexi, B. Chor, O. Goldreich
and C. P. Schnorr. RSA and Rabin functions: certain parts are as
hard as the whole. SIAM Jounal on Computing, 17 (1988), 194-
209. [3] H. Beker and F. Piper. Cipher Systems, The Protection
of Communications. John Wiley and Sons, 1982. [4] G. Brassard.
Modern Cryptology - A Tutorial. Lecture Notes in Computer
Science, vol. 325, Springer-Verlag, 1988. [5] F. Chabaud. On the
security of some cryptosystems based on error-correcting
codes. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, to appear.
(Advances in Cryptology - EUROCRYPT '94.) [6] D. Coppersmith
(Ed.) Advances in Cryptology - CRYPTO '95 Proceedings. Lecture
Notes in Computer Science, vol. 963, Springer-Verlag, 1995. [7]
W. Diffie and M. E. Hellman. New directions in cryptography.
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 22 (1976), 644-654.