What is the primary goal of cryptography?

The primary goal of cryptography is to protect information privacy, integrity, and authenticity. This means that cryptography is fundamentally about ensuring that data is kept confidential from unauthorized access (privacy), that it remains accurate and unaltered during storage and transmission (integrity), and that it can be verified to confirm that it comes from a legitimate source (authenticity).

In practice, cryptography employs various techniques and algorithms to encrypt data, making it unreadable to anyone who does not possess the proper key or method of decryption. This is crucial in today’s digital world, where sensitive information such as personal data, financial records, and corporate secrets are frequently exchanged and stored online.

Enhancing web content delivery, improving user access, and facilitating data backups may incorporate encryption methods, but they do not capture the essence of cryptography’s primary purpose. Hence, while those aspects might be ancillary benefits or applications of cryptographic techniques, they are not the core objective, which is fundamentally centered around safeguarding information from unauthorized access and tampering.