Data Encryption is what keeps your personal data secure when you’re shopping or banking online. It scrambles data like your credit card details and home address to ensure hackers can’t misuse this information.
In the computing world, encryption is the conversion of data from a readable format into an encoded format that can only be read or processed after it’s been decrypted.
Data Encryption is the basic building block of data security and is the simplest and most important way to ensure a computer system’s information can’t be stolen and read by someone who wants to use it for nefarious means.
It started with Ancient Spartan technology (600 BC), Roman encryption, and ciphers (60 BC), Hebern rotor machine. (1917), WW2 cryptography (1932-1945), and Modern cryptography to date. As more and more services move to the cloud, encrypting data in transit is crucial, and cryptographers are continually developing and refining solutions to this challenge.
Cryptography is a benediction to information processing and communications, because it allows people to store information securely and conduct private communications over long distances. There are mainly two aspects in cryptography, algorithms and the key used. The important encryption techniques are symmetric ,asymmetric, hash function algorithms.
Also known as a secret key algorithm, this is a singular method of decoding the message that must be provided to the receiver before the message can be decoded. The key used to encode is the same as the one used to decode, which makes it best for individual users and closed systems. Otherwise, the key has to be sent to the receiver, which increases the risk of compromise if it’s intercepted by a third party, such as a hacker. This method is much faster than the asymmetric method.
The sender and the recipient should know the secret key that is used to encrypt and decrypt all the messages. The main disadvantage of the symmetric key encryption is that all parties involved have to exchange the key used to encrypt the data before they can decrypt it.
Asymmetric Cryptography
This method uses two different keys — public and private — that are linked together mathematically. The keys are essentially just large numbers that have been paired with each other but aren’t identical, hence the term asymmetric. The public key can be shared with anyone, but the private key must remain a secret. Both can be used to encrypt a message, and the opposite key from the one originally used to encrypt that message is then used to decode it.
A message that is encrypted using a public key can only be decrypted using a private key, while also, a message encrypted using a private key can be decrypted using a public key. Security of the public key is not required because it is publicly available and can be passed over the internet. Asymmetric key has a far better power in ensuring the security of information transmitted during communication.
hash Cryptography
This method is a function that converts a data string into a numeric string output of fixed length. The output string is generally much smaller than the original data. Hash algorithms are designed to be collision-resistant, meaning that there is a very low probability that the same string would be created for different data.
Cryptographic hashes take cleartext passwords and turn them into enciphered text for storage. Attackers who access your database are forced to decipher those hash values if they want to exploit them. In other words, hashes slow down attackers.
Cryptographic hash functions have many information security applications, notably in digital signatures, message authentication codes (MACs), and other forms of authentication. They can also be used as ordinary hash functions, to index data in hash tables, for fingerprinting, to detect duplicate data or uniquely identify files, and as checksums to detect accidental data corruption. Indeed, in information security contexts, cryptographic hash values are sometimes called (digital) fingerprints, checksums, or just hash values, even though all these terms stand for functions with rather different properties and purposes.
