What is encryption?

What is encryption and how is it used today with the ever growing market of personal computers and the internet?

Since the internet has become such an important tool to access an endless source of information, having a system to securely perform this on your computer is extremely important to a large majority of people today.

A process called Encryption becomes vital for a secure and safe environment for the computers and the internet. The basis of encryption comes from the age old process called cryptography, which is basically secret writing that needs to be decoded. Since cryptography is a code that relies on human input, computers are needed to have a secure process by which the code cannot be cracked and a secure transmission is delivered.

What exactly is encryption? First of all, encryption is a method by which any kind of messages such as email, e-commerce, banking, or any other personal information, become encoded so they are illegible to anyone other the intended person without a special deciphering of the code, with a special key or other code. This form of security is necessary to handle the privacy of almost all personal and private information that passes through from one computer to another. Information such as data or messages that are sent is regarded as plain text until that information is encrypted and then is labeled as cipher text.

Here is a list of several ways encryption is used on the internet today:

Banks and other financial institutions

Credit card companies

Private correspondence (e-mail)

Information for applications, for example, social security numbers, individual personal profile data, and any other personal profile information.

Company profiles and private information

Computers may use either one of two encryption schemes; public key or symmetric key, to convert plain text into cipher text with the end result of locking or unlocking data.

First let's take a look at public key encryption.

Public key encryption allows two keys to be used with a user, a public key, and a private key. The public key is given by your computer to any other computer that it communicates with. Then, to decode a message a private key given to a specific individual user is used along with the public key.

PGP is a public key encryption scheme that has become more widespread since it allows the user to encrypt practically any amount of information.

Another encryption is the symmetric key.

Symmetric key only uses one key that is a secret between your computer and the other one you are communicating with.

Symmetric keys may be a faster method to use, but the two computers involved must exchange their information securely, where public key encryption avoids this problem.

The conversion of the plain text to cipher text is done using encryption algorithm, which is basically mathematical instructions used to achieve the conversion.

The difference between the two encryption schemes is the length of the algorithm keys, where the public key uses a larger amount of bits than the symmetric key.

Most computer systems use both the public key and symmetric key encryption today.

Encryption seems to be the most reliable process to provide the much needed security people can rely on today to handle most of their important and personal transactions, leaving them with assurance and confidence.