Symmetric-key algorithms are a class of algorithms for cryptography that use trivially related, often identical, cryptographic keys for both encryption of plaintext and decryption of ciphertext. The encryption key is trivially related to the decryption key, in that they may be identical or there is a simple transformation to go between the two keys. The keys, in practice, represent a shared secret between two or more parties that can be used to maintain a private information link. Other terms for symmetric-key encryption are secret-key, single-key, shared-key, one-key, and private-key encryption. Use of the last and first terms can create ambiguity with similar terminology used in public-key cryptography. Symmetric-key cryptography is to be contrasted with asymmetric-key cryptography.
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Symmetric-key encryption can use either stream ciphers or block ciphers.
Examples of popular and well-respected symmetric algorithms include Twofish, Serpent, AES (Rijndael), Blowfish, CAST5, RC4, 3DES, and IDEA.
Symmetric ciphers are often used to achieve other cryptographic primitives than just encryption.
Encrypting a message does not guarantee that this message is not changed while encrypted. Hence often a message authentication code is added to a ciphertext to ensure that changes to the ciphertext will be noted by the receiver. Message authentication codes can be constructed from symmetric ciphers (e.g. CBC-MAC).
However, symmetric ciphers also can be used for non-repudiation purposes by ISO 13888-2 standard.
Another application is to build hash functions from block ciphers. See one-way compression function for descriptions of several such methods.
Many modern block ciphers are based on a construction proposed by Horst Feistel. Feistel's construction makes it possible to build invertible functions from other functions that are themselves not invertible.
Symmetric ciphers have historically been susceptible to known-plaintext attacks, chosen plaintext attacks, differential cryptanalysis and linear cryptanalysis. Careful construction of the functions for each round can greatly reduce the chances of a successful attack.
When used with asymmetric ciphers for key transfer, pseudorandom key generators are nearly always used to generate the symmetric cipher session keys. However, lack of randomness in those generators or in their initialization vectors is disastrous and has led to cryptanalytic breaks in the past. Therefore, it is essential that an implementation uses a source of high entropy for its initialization.