What is Cryptography, and How it Helps to Secure the Data?

You might have heard about cryptography. But you may not have the complete information regarding this. Well, here you will get the complete information which may help you to take the decision further.

This study secures the communication technique where only sender and recipient can view the message and its content. This term has come from one of the Greek word called “Kryptos” that means hidden.

Kryptos is very closely related to the encryption and this act like an scrambling ordinary text that is also well-known as a ciphertext and back upon arrival. Cryptography uses the technique that covers the obfuscation, and it includes few images where microdots are available.

It transmits electronic data and encrypts, decrypt the email to the other plain-test message. This is a very simple method that it uses “secret key” and encoded the message where the recipient sent the decryption.

Cryptography Maintains Four Objectives

1. Confidentiality- The information is not understand where and for whom it was unintended.
2. Integrity- This information cannot be altered or transit between the sender and receiver without being detected.
3. Non-repudiation- A sender of the information has to create the transmission of the information, and for doing this, they should not deny it.
4. Authentication- In this, sender and receiver can always can confirm their identity of and their destination.

What all are the Applications of Cryptography?

For securing data, Cryptography has to run with its application. It has many areas which help to keep safe every portal. Those are

1. SSL/TLS Encryption- In these days browsing anything online is secure because cryptography controls your data flow. It starts with browser identification and ends with server authentication, all gets simplified with online browsing.
2. Digital Signatures- Through this digital contract gaining prominence this world needs to secure the channel so that it can pass all type of documents. Cryptography provides layer authentication, which can particular the confidentiality and the integrity of the documents.
3. Safe online banking- Online banking and payment applications are safe now a day to encrypt the data. This makes authentication enable verifying the identity with certain individuals before they allow to hold the transaction and it helps reduce the fraud credit card processing.
4. Secure Chatting Service- There are few messaging applications like Telegram, Whatsapp, and other signal that are now adopted end-to end encrypt protocol which guarantees that no one can read the message except the authorized person (sender and receiver). This is one of the vast set up where security always goes toss-up. These all because of cryptography and the plethora available for the communication platform.
5. Encrypted Emails- Through vast email amount of private information pass to the inbox, and everything goes with the secure method, and communication is very much necessary for this. Pretty Good Privacy is one of the encryption algorithms which helps email to encrypt all the time.
6. Crypto-currency- Cryptocurrency work with the blockchain technology where astronomically internet rates goes high and still today this is one of the most sought-in the tread market. This is fully decentralized, tamper-proof and secure system which gets a way in today’s digital sphere.

What type of technique does Cryptography use?

There are three types that cryptography use generally. Those are below

1. Symmetric-key Cryptography- In this, both sender and the receiver use the single key. The sender uses the key as plaintext and send it as a ciphertext to the receiver. On the other hand, the receiver needs to apply the same key decrypting the message and recovering the plain text.
2. Public-key Cryptography- This is one of the best revolutionary concepts lasting for 300 to 400 years. In this, both the key equally gets used private and public key. Mainly this private key always pairs with the public key, and it is freely distributed. This public key gets used for encryption, and the private key get used for decryption.
3. Hash Function- In this algorithm, no key gets used, and this has a fixed-length hash value computed as per the plain text. This makes things impossible for the content with the plain text so that it can recover everything. The hash function is also gets used with many operating systems to encrypt the password.

Principles of Cryptography

The most essential principle you need to keep in mind and not attempt your own cryptosystem. When things come to “secret,” it comes with security. You need to be sure you take appropriate steps to protected the key which usually systems use.

You should not store an encryption keys to clear the text along with data that are protected. Here you can get three common methods to protect the key. Those are below

1. There are store keys that are in the filesystem, and they will protect them with strong access control lists (ACLs). You need to remember to adhere to the principle of the latest privilege.
2. Encryption key gets used as a second key, which gets generated by using password-base encryption (PBE). This password has a minimum number of administrators who can use to generate a key by algorithm like bcrypt, PBKDF2, scrypt, etc. These are the bootstrap of the cryptosystem.
3. A hardware security module (HSM) has a tamper-resistant hardware appliance that get used to store the keys securely. There are code that make API call to a HSM to provide the keys when need to perform for the decryption of the data.

What is cryptography used for?

We have already mentioned few specific applications that keep military secret to transmit the financial data and keep your information safely across the internet. There are a few broad cybersecurity goals that cryptography helped to achieve. Here we will discuss few pros of cryptography technique; those are below

1. Every content can have an confidential data; through this you can keep that data safe.
2. You can authenticate the message identity where sender and receiver will be included.
3. It ensures the integrity of data which showed that it had not been altered.
4. You need to demonstrate where the sender it supposed to send the message and its principle; these all are non-repudiation.

FINAL THOUGHTS

From this tutorial, we have a better understanding of cryptography and why it is essential, and its application. These all have a real-life implementation with the demonstration. Though everything is not perfect, cryptography always tries to give a secure environment to prevent cybercrime and keep safe everything as much as possible