5. Conclusion

We have tried to give an initial idea of current cryptography. Of course, it is not our intention to be exhaustive in any way. Books that come close to such an object, and of which we would like to be a prelude, are referenced [35] and [47] , they contain hundreds of pages.

We can, however, give a few points of comparison between the different algorithms we have discussed. In particular, we should mention the relationship between public-key and secret-key cryptography. Most secret-key algorithms, such as DES or shift-register-based encryption techniques, have in common very high throughput capacities: these techniques are very fast, especially when it comes to building specialized electronic circuits. Conversely, public-key techniques,...