As we know encryption is know as to make information secret with some key or password to so that no one can access information without key/password. Then what is cipher? Cipher is encrypted data generated by a method/algorithm know as cipher algorithm.

There are several type of ciphers developed to encrypt data. Commonly ciphers involved some form or substitution or transposition of alphabetical letters. Substitution means to substitute one character for another while transposition is some form of repositioning characters within the message (which literally scrambles the information).

Common types of cipher

In digital world two types of cipher used, in first same key is used to encrypt and decrypt and in other one key is used to encrypt and other is used to decrypt also know as key pair. This is also know as symmetric(private key) and asymmetric(public key) cryptography.

Most common ciphers algorithm

DES (Data Encryption Standard) and AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) are two well known ciphers based on symmetric key algorithms while RSA (Rivest, Shamir and Adleman) is a well known cipher based on asymmetric key algorithms.

“Cipher is encrypted data generated by cipher(encryption) algorithms and encrypted data is referred as cipher.”