What does the art and science of cryptography focus on?

The focus of cryptography is primarily on hiding the meaning of communications, which is fundamental to securing messages and ensuring confidentiality. Cryptography employs various techniques such as encryption and decryption to transform readable data into an unreadable format, making it accessible only to authorized parties who hold the appropriate keys. This ability to conceal the content of communications protects sensitive information from eavesdroppers and unauthorized access, ensuring that even if data is intercepted, it remains unintelligible without the means to decrypt it.

While ensuring data integrity, establishing network protocols, and managing firewalls are all important aspects of information security, they do not encapsulate the primary role of cryptography. Data integrity focuses on ensuring that information remains unaltered during storage or transmission, network protocols deal with the rules and conventions for data exchange, and firewall management revolves around controlling incoming and outgoing network traffic to protect systems from threats. Cryptography specifically targets the confidentiality of information, which is why it is correctly associated with hiding the meaning of communications.