Security Corner: Crypto Streams

The goal of any encryption operation is to scramble the patterns in the plaintext source data and otherwise protect its contents by rendering a specific message indistinguishable from random noise. A cryptographically-secure algorithm or implementation is one that can be mathematically proven to render data in such a state---there is no mathematical way to analyze or extract information from a securely encrypted payload. The most important feature of an encryption system, though, is we can revert such a scrambled message to a readable format via a known operation and a specific piece of private information---the decryption key.