CONCLUSION.

6. CONCLUSION... OF SORTS

This paper has briefly described how cryptography works. The reader must beware, however, that there are a number of ways to attack every one of these systems; cryptanalysis and attacks on cryptosystems, however, are well beyond the scope of this paper. In the words of Sherlock Holmes (ok, Arthur Conan Doyle, really), "What one man can invent, another can discover" ("The Adventure of the Dancing Men").
Cryptography is a particularly interesting field because of the amount of work that is, by necessity, done in secret. The irony is that secrecy is not the key to the goodness of a cryptographic algorithm. Regardless of the mathematical theory behind an algorithm, the best algorithms are those that are well-known and well-documented because they are also well-tested and well-studied! In fact, time is the only true test of good cryptography; any cryptographic scheme that stays in use year after year is most likely a good one. The strength of cryptography lies in the choice (and management) of the keys; longer keys will resist attack better than shorter keys.
The corollary to this is that consumers should run, not walk, away from any product that uses a proprietary cryptography scheme, ostensibly because the algorithm's secrecy is an advantage. The observation that a cryptosystem should be secure even if everything about the system — except the key — is known by your adversary has been a fundamental tenet of cryptography for over 125 years. It was first stated by Dutch linguist Auguste Kerckhoffs von Nieuwenhoff in his 1883 (yes, 1883) papers titled La Cryptographie militaire, and has therefore become known as "Kerckhoffs' Principle."

Getting a new crypto methodology accepted and, therefore, commercially viable, is always an interesting challenge. And speaking of challenges, take a look at the DioCipher $10,000 challenge page (expires 1 January 2013). I leave it to the reader to consider the validity and usefulness of the process, the challenge, and — ultimately — the algorithm!