Cryptography is the practice of securing communication through encryption and decryption techniques to transmit information secretly. There are three eras in the history of cryptography: the manual era, mechanical era, and modern era. The main types of cryptography are encryption, which locks up information, and decryption, which unlocks encrypted information. Cryptography uses keys, either symmetric keys where the same key encrypts and decrypts, or public key cryptography which uses two separate keys - a private key and public key.