What Is Encryption And How Does It Concern You?
The Rundown On Encryption And How It Applies To You
In this day and age where the Internet is very easily accessible, information becomes more shared and easily obtainable.
Most of the information that is easily obtainable holds a lot of power, such as personal information or business information. Most of us are unaware of how the data we put online or on our devices is protected. Think about it, how often do you stop and wonder, “Hey, what if someone managed to access my computer? What happens to my data then?”
That’s what encryption is for. Encryption protects the information and data that we store or use. Encryption encodes information and jumbles it up into unreadable format to mask the actual message. Think of encryption like a safe. You can find the safe, and you know there are contents inside. However, you do not know the contents, and the safe is locked by a key that only the owner has. That’s basically an idea of what encryption is.
Encryption is the process of using a secret key which only the owner knows, and encrypting the contents of a message. This way, only the owner can use his own key to decrypt the message and retrieve its contents.
Actually, encryption was started long ago by the Greeks to pass sensitive war information and other secrets between diplomats, merchants and the royals. Julius Caesar also had his own way of encryption, known today as the Caesar Cipher. The Caesar Cipher worked in the way that each letter in a message was moved up by 3 spaces, so an “A” became a “D”, and a “B” became an “E”.
The message “I like pie”, would become “L olnh slh”. This would be called the
“ciphertext”, while the original message is called the “plaintext”. People who come across the ciphertext would have no idea what it meant unless they had the secret key, which was to move the ciphertext alphabets back by 3 spaces.
Today, encryption is more widely used in a digital version. Encryption is used when you access websites, the bank ATM and when sending information over your network.
The number of encryption algorithms has increased, some of which include DES, AES, RSA and many many more.
Encryption is a huge topic which I would not cover entirely in this article, maybe in the future instead. For this article, I will just detail how encryption is relevant to you and how it is applied in your daily lives. Read on to find out!
Why You Should Care About Encryption
Anyone using the internet and other sources of digital media like email and social media accounts can have their information stolen by hackers and criminals. This is why you need encryption to secure and keep your data safe. This way, even if the data is stolen, the attackers cannot read at all.
Encryption is crucial to keeping your information safe and secure and to ensure that no one unauthorised can access it.
I will now state 5 common ways encryption is being used in your daily lives.
1. Accessing Web Contents
When you use your web browser and surf the Internet, you visit websites and webpages that display content to you. Some examples include www.google.com, www.facebook.com and many more.
When you surf to www.google.com, your web browser requests the webpage information from Google’s server. Assuming you are filling in a form on the google site, your browser will send that form information to Google’s server over the Internet. That form may contain personal information like your email address or phone number.
That's where encryption comes in. Using HTTPS, the form data is encrypted before being sent to Google’s server where it is decrypted and stored. This way, even if your information is intercepted, no one can decrypt it and retrieve your personal information.
You can tell if HTTPS is being used by the padlock icon at the top left portion of your web browser as seen above.
2. Operating Systems and USB Devices
Operating systems refer to software that your device uses to run, such as Microsoft Windows 7,8,9, Linux or Apple Macintosh. These OSs are usually encrypted using built-in encryption methods. For example, Windows uses Bitlocker and Apple uses Filevault, both of which is used to encrypt critical and sensitive files store in your device storage.
Encryption is also used to encrypt data stored on USB Devices and external drives. For example, Samsung T5 SSDs are encrypted and utilize a password to access. This way, data stored on your portable drives are also protected in case it gets stolen or misused.
3. Emails
Email encryption is crucial to ensure that the mail you send and receive is protected and kept secret. This ensures the sensitive information you send through email is kept private.
Email servers are also secured with SSL certificates or TLS along with public key encryption methods. Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is also used to send and receive encrypted messages.
4. Databases
Encrypting databases help to prevent hackers from stealing or seeing organizational data. These databases can contain things like statistics, employee information, passwords and much more sensitive information. Hence, it is important to ensure that the databases are well secured and protected.
Transparent Database Encryption is a very popular encryption method used to encrypt the data stored inside databases.
5. Credit Card Payments
When you use online payment systems, it is also secured using point to point encryption. This method is designed and regulated by the PCI Security Standards Council and is used to protect sensitive information used in online transactions.
For example, when you swipe your credit card, it basically enters your payment information into the credit card terminal. The terminal then encrypts your data before sending it to payment processing servers for decryption and validation.
By encrypting your payment information, it keeps it safe from interceptions. Even if the information was intercepted, the attacker would not be able to obtain your payment information.
Conclusion
Data encryption is a must-have in today's world. Almost every single service or operation uses encryption. This article just barely scratches the surface of cryptography and encryption. I hope this read was worth your while and helped you better understand what encryption is and how it is used in your daily lives.
