Basic question about encryption - what exactly are keys?

Posted by Tomas on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Tomas
Published on 2010-03-13T06:21:38Z Indexed on 2010/03/13 6:25 UTC
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encryption

Hi, I was browsing and found good articles about encryption. However, none of them described why the key lenght is important and what exactly the key is used for. My guess is that could work this way:

             0101001101010101010
Key:         01010010101010010101   //the longer the key, the longer unique sequence
XOR or smth: //result

Is this at least a bit how it works or I am missing something? Thanks

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Basic question about encryption - what exactly are keys? - Developer IT

Basic question about encryption - what exactly are keys?

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