
I wanted to hear if anyone could sum up the basic science behind modern day encryption ? I'm writing a small paper in school about the German encrypting machine "Enigma" that was used during WW2, dunno if you know it. But anyways one of my topics in this paper is to compare the encrypting methods between Enigma and modern days encrypting. I could maybe read something in books and so on, but it's a small paper which we only got a week to do, ending friday....
I know that a key is used in a certain logarithm and this logarithm encrypts the message. Then you would need the same key, or another, to decrypt the message in the right way. f(x) encrypts the message and f(x)-1 decrypts the message. But I don't see how the key fits into this.
Hope that someone can help me with this, in a not to complex language
