Encryption protects information during transmission. It has its roots in basic ciphers and has evolved to include SSL and public key systems. Hash functions are used for user authentication. Quantum cryptography may be the most secure method, relying on the laws of physics.
Everyone has secrets and some have more than others. When it becomes necessary to pass those secrets from one point to another, it’s important to protect the information while it’s in transit. Encryption has various methods of taking readable and readable data and turning it into unreadable data for the purpose of secure transmission, then using a key to turn it back into readable data when it reaches its destination.
Anticipating computers by thousands of years, cryptography has its roots in basic transposition ciphers, which assign each letter of the alphabet a particular value. A simple example is to assign each letter a progressively higher number, where A=1, B=2, and so on. Using this formula, for example, the word “wiseGEEK”, when encrypted, would be “23 9 19 5 7 5 5 11”. Machines were invented during World War II that made codes more complicated and difficult to crack, and today computers have made them even stronger.
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a common encryption protocol used in e-commerce. When someone makes a purchase over the Internet, this is the technology the merchant uses to make sure the buyer can securely transmit their credit card information. Using this protocol, the computer and the online merchant’s computer agree to create a sort of private “tunnel” through the public internet. This process is called a “handshake”. When a URL in a web browser begins with “https” instead of “http”, it is a secure connection using SSL.
Some encryption methods use a “secret key” to allow the recipient to decrypt the message. The most common secret key encryption system is Data Encryption Standard (DES), or the more secure Triple-DES, which encrypts data three times.
More common are systems that use a public key system, such as the Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol. This system uses two keys that work together: a public one, accessible to anyone, and a private one, kept secret by whoever receives the data. When a person wants to send a secure message to someone else, the person encrypts that message using the recipient’s public key. Once encrypted, the recipient must use their private key to decrypt it.
The goal of encryption goes beyond just making data unreadable; it also extends to user authentication, which provides the recipient with the certainty that the encrypted message is from a trusted source. Hash functions are sometimes used in conjunction with private key or public key systems. This is a type of one-way encryption, which applies an algorithm to a message so that the message itself cannot be recovered. Unlike key-based encryption, the goal of the hash function is not to encrypt data for later decryption, but to create a kind of fingerprint of a message. The value derived from applying the hash function can be recomputed on the receiving side, to ensure that the message has not been tampered with in transit. Then, a key-based system is applied to decrypt the message.
The study of this field is advancing steadily, and scientists are rapidly creating mechanisms that are harder to break. The most secure type so far may be quantum cryptography, a method that hasn’t been perfected yet. Instead of using a key, it relies on the fundamental laws of physics and the movement and orientation of photons to establish an absolutely secure and indestructible connection.
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