Encryption

Have you ever wondered when you start a conversation with new person it shows “Message to this chat and call are now secured with end-to-end encryption”. Here what does the encryption mean? If you are like me, who wonder what does it means I am here to clear your doubt.

Encryption:

It is a process of converting readable texts into unreadable form(text) through key which can be use to decrypt the unreadable text into plain text.

What is key?

A key is a string of characters used within an encryption algorithm for altering data so that it appears random. Like a physical key, it encrypts data so that only someone with the right key can decrypt it.

In Computer term unencrypted data is called “Plain text” and encrypted data is called “Cipher text” and the formula used to encode and decode the text is called “Cipher”.And the science of encryption and decryption of information is called “Cryptography”.

Why is data encryption necessary?

Privacy: Encryption ensures that no one can read communications or data except the intended recipient or proper data owner. This prevents cyber criminals, ad networks, Internet service providers, and in some cases governments from intercepting and reading sensitive data.

Security: Encryption helps data breaches, whether the data is in transit or at rest. If a corporate device is lost or stolen and its hard drive is properly encrypted, the data on that device will likely still be secure. Similarly, encrypted communications enable the communicating parties to exchange sensitive data without leaking the data. Encryption also helps prevent malicious behavior such as man-in-the-middle attacks.

Authentication: Public key encryption, among other things, establishes that a website's origin server owns the private key and therefore was legitimately issued an SSL certificate (see What is public key encryption? to learn more).

Types of encryption:

1.Symmetric cipher

2.Asymmetric cipher

1.Symmetric cipher use only one key which does the both works encode as well as decode the text. The key is sometime referred as shared secret key because the same is use in encryption and the same key is public provide to the authorized user. The most widely use symmetric cipher is Advanced encryption standard (AES). Symmetric encryption is usually much faster than Asymmetric encryption.

2. Asymmetric cipher uses two keys in which any one can be used to encode the text and the other key can decrypt the text.

Note: The key which encode the text can be use to decode the text.

This type of often use prime numbers to create keys since it is computationally difficult to factor large prime numbers and reverse engineer the encryption. The RSA(Rivest-Shamir-Adieman) is most commonly used algorithm.