Comparative Analysis of Various Cryptographic Algorithms

Does increased security provide comfort to fearful people? Or does security provide some very basic protections that we are inexperienced to believe that we don't need? During this time when the Internet provides essential communication between millions of people and is being increasingly used as a tool for commerce, trading, research & banking, security becomes a tremendously important issue to deal with. There are many aspects to security and many applications, ranging from secure commerce and payments to private communications and protecting passwords. This paper has two major purposes. The first is to define some of the terms and concepts behind basic cryptographic methods, and second is to offer a way to compare the myriad cryptographic algorithms in use today.