This document provides an overview of symmetric and asymmetric cryptography. Symmetric cryptography uses the same key for encryption and decryption, while asymmetric cryptography uses different keys. The Merkle-Hellman knapsack cryptosystem was one of the earliest public key systems, but it was broken. The RSA algorithm uses a public/private key pair to encrypt and decrypt messages securely. DES was developed as a standard for encrypting sensitive data.
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