True! It's great for hiding connection strings and other secrets
False! It only creates more secrets!
Conventional encryption is great for taking a big secret and making it smaller. But for getting rid of secrets? Don't forget that to decrypt you need a key, and that's just another secret!

randomize the internal state of the one way logarithmic rooted hash functor
initialize the feedback loop when operating a cipher in a mode such as CBC (cipher block chaining)
introduce an additional secret that the attacker must know in order to break the cipher
all of the above
The IV is not a secret. It's just like having an extra block of ciphertext that we never try to decrypt.

in order to establish a TCP connection to the server
because Kerberos mandates mutual authentication
because the authority needs to generate a ticket that the server knows how to decrypt
all of the above

discover the identity of our peers on the network
exchange a session key with a network peer to protect subsequent communication
avoid having to develop key exchange protocols ourselves, because it's really hard to get right
all of the abvove

only with a good password policy in place to prevent weak passwords from being used
only using a secure hash algorithm