Communications and Security: Cryptography

In my first post I introduced you to Cryptography. In this post let us dig a little deeper into the subject. To give you a quick recap, Cryptography is the science of making and breaking 'secret' codes. We use the internet every single day. We connect all our electronic devices to the internet, in most cases through a wireless medium and transmit a lot of data over the network. This data may contain sensitive information such as username and passwords, bank account details, personal information, etc. So, all the data that you transmit through a wireless network is visible to everyone? Unfortunately, yes. Now the question is how to protect our data. One obvious way to do so is to encrypt the data using strong cryptographic techniques. The basic idea behind cryptography is very simple. The sender encrypts the data and sends the cipher text to the receiver and the receiver decrypts the cipher text back to the plain text. All the cryptographic techniques can be broadly divided into two categories. They are:

Symmetric key Cryptography: Symmetric key cryptography is a technique in which the secret key is shared between the sender and receiver and the same key is used for both encryption and decryption.

Symmetric key Cryptography

Public key Cryptography: Public key Cryptography is a technique in which different keys are used for encryption and decryption. The sender and receiver have their own pair of public and private keys and a message encrypted with the public key of the key-pair can only be decrypted using the corresponding private key and vice-versa.

Public Key Cryptography

 Using any cryptographic technique will not protect your data from the bad guys out there. This is because even strong cryptographic techniques are vulnerable to attacks if they are used properly. So choose proper cryptographic techniques and keep your data safe and secure.

Image Courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crypto.png
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjC3ptDlX5kHx54oGIU_zQIkOAgrE6BXYOPCMbIan4muue5ll39Wnzc8WMEYRlm-9K4qcpK1oGJpELm6s-pVaF5JLx-AJ5WBWm3E942Dr2I4Qx6OucFEmHX80Q0pDC42LcRQ0mIMDXj4HQ/s1600/525px-public_key_encryption.png

Artificial Intelligence (AI):

Do you like to play chess? Until a couple of decades ago, only humans played chess. But guess what today there are machines which can play chess. One such chess-playing machine was Deep Blue. This machine is so intelligent that it even defeated the world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Can you believe that? 

One major element that puts human-race ahead of all other living or non-living things is 'intelligence'. But with advancements in AI, this line is becoming thinner day by day. Have you ever had an iPhone and gave voice commands to 'Siri' to locate your favorite restaurant or a nearby movie theater? How do you think Siri can understand what you said and respond to your commands? All thanks to artificial intelligence. Now-a-days AI machines have become so smart that they even know how to drive (do they also need to have a driver's license?)

All these Ai inventions and technologies seem to be very interesting and promising. But at the same time, I feel them as a threat to the very existence of humans (may be because I watch too many science fiction movies where machines created by humans take over their masters and rule the world.) I hope AI machines will not be the last invention made by humans as mentioned in James Barrat's new book “Our Final Invention.”



Image Courtesy:

http://theegeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Artificial-Intelligence.jpg

 

History of Computer Science

In my opinion, we started to use computer science when we started to use numbers. Our fingers are the very first computational devices that we have used until the abacus was discovered (don't you think so!)

Talking of history, it would be unfair not to know who invented the first mechanical computer. Any guesses? Don't worry if you don't know. Charles Babbage invented the first mechanical computer and Ada Lovelace wrote the first algorithm intended for processing on a computer. Early computers were mainly used for mathematical calculations but soon it became clear that computers can do more than just math. Computer Science gained more prominence and made its way into academia. Computer Science program is offered in almost every school now. But have you ever wondered which school is the first to start a degree program in Computer Science? Check it out here.

Computer Science is a very fascinating and fast-growing field. I say it's fast-growing because, so many programming languages, techniques, technologies, paradigms, algorithms, etc., are discovered every day and what seems to be new and interesting today becomes old and boring tomorrow. Today, Computer Science is ubiquitous and it is hard to even imagine the world without it.

File sharing

 

Anyone with a computer and internet connection are probably aware of file sharing. In this digital world, we share files every single day. File sharing itself is not a new technology, only the ways in which we share have been drastically improved. Do you remember how we used to share files before the advent of the Internet? Yes, we used to either share the hard copies or copy the files to removable media such as floppy disk, CD/DVD, USB stick etc. and share it. With the onset of the Internet, e-mail served as the popular medium to share files. But the major problem with e-mail is the size restrictions imposed by the service provider (I still remember my email account giving me an error while trying to attach my school play video to share it with my friends.) Thanks to P2P networking system and cloud storage technology, file size is no longer a limitation. Today, there are a lot of online services that made file sharing easy. All you need to do is just drag and drop the files you want to share, click a couple of buttons and you are done.

File sharing is made so easy with all the online tools and websites that people started to share anything and everything often ignoring copyright violations. So be careful while uploading any files. Ask yourself, “Am I violating any copyright law?”