Cybersecurity key and lock: Cryptography

Cryptography is the art of securing information, ensuring that it can be read only by those intended to read it. It's the foundation of data security, protecting everything from personal messages, and corporation emails, to bank transactions.

Simply, cryptography is scrambling readable data (Plainetext) to unreadable data (Ciphertext) using encryption methods.

Different cryptographic algorithms can provide confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, or authorisation for data. Some algorithms offer one or more of these features, but none can deliver all of them in a single solution. Therefore, we often need to combine solutions to ensure our data is fully protected.

Symmetric Encryption

Symmetric encryption is one of the simplest and oldest forms of encryption. It uses the same key for both encryption and decryption. Imagine you lock your house door with a key (encryption), and the only way to open the door (decryption) is with that same or a copy of the key you handed to your family members (authorised people).

Symmetric encryption is fast and efficient, making it ideal for encrypting large amounts of data, files on a hard drive or database are often encrypted with symmetric encryption, also Symmetric encryption is used to secure data in transit between a user and a remote server.

However, there is a major security concern with the symmetric key, and it is a secure share of the key between the sender and receiver, If someone intercepts the key, the security of our data is compromised!

Asymmetric Encryption

Asymmetric encryption, also known as public-key cryptography, involves two keys: a public key and a private key. The public key encrypts data, and the private key decrypts it. These keys are mathematically related but not identical, meaning data encrypted with the public key can only be decrypted with the corresponding private key. The public key as it is clear from its name is publicly shared, while the private key is the part that needs to be kept securely. The magic of Asymmetric Encryption is that, although the key pairs are mathematically related, knowing the public key you cannot find the private key.

Asymmetric encryption is computationally more intensive and slower compared to symmetric encryption. Digital signature and secure key exchange are the main use cases for public-key cryptography.

• Digital Signatures: Asymmetric encryption is used to verify the authenticity and integrity of a message or document. The sender signs the data with their private key, and the receiver verifies it using the sender's public key.

• Secure Key Exchange: In many secure communications, asymmetric encryption is used to exchange keys for symmetric encryption, combining the strengths of both methods.

While encryption itself primarily ensures confidentiality, integrity is often secured through additional cryptographic methods such as hashing.

• Hashing: Hashing is a process of converting data into a fixed-size string nonreversible set of characters. It’s used to ensure data integrity, as any change in the input will produce a different hash. There are many use cases for hashing, one is verifying the integrity of downloaded files. When downloading a software package for instance, a hash value is often provided. After downloading, you can compute the hash of the file and compare it to the provided hash to ensure the file hasn’t been corrupted or altered.

  
  

Cryptography is a vital component of cybersecurity, protecting data through encryption and ensuring secure communication.

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