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.
Great post. I enjoyed reading this post on cryptography. I also appreciate your links at the bottom. I would have liked to see some links to articles that are more in-depth on the subject. It would be interesting to learn a little about how the encryption algorithms are created and implemented. Im still confused about how private and public keys work. Are the encryption keys really public? Other than these comments I thought your post was written very well and is a great starting point for people wanting to know more. Thank you.
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