Cryptography

[Sarah]

The act or art of writing in secret characters; also, secretcharacters, or cipher.

[Sarah]

converting information from its comprehenisble form to a nonsensical form that can only be cracked with special knowledge or a lot of free time. used in the military by ciphers that encrypt messages/information to be kept from prying eyes

[Sarah]

The science of making big data even bigger.

[Ernesto]

Cryptography is the science of protecting information by transforming it into a secure format. This process, called encryption, has been used for centuries to prevent handwritten messages from being read by unintended recipients. Today, cryptography is used to protect digital data. It is a division of computer science that focuses on transforming data into formats that cannot be recognized by unauthorized users.
An example of basic cryptography is a encrypted message in which letters are replaced with other characters. To decode the encrypted contents, you would need a grid or table that defines how the letters are transposed. For example, the translation grid below could be used to decode 1234125678906 as techterms.com.
The above table is also called a cipher. Ciphers can be simple translation codes, such as the example above, or complex algorithms. While simple codes sufficed for encoding handwritten notes, computers can easily break, or figure out, these types of codes. Because computers can process billions of calculations per second, they can even break complex algorithms in a matter of seconds. Therefore, modern cryptography involves developing encryption methods that are difficult for even supercomputers to break.

[exinilu]

the practice of creating and understanding codes that keep information secret

[Kai]

The art of writing or solving codes.