Encryption: What, When and Why
Before the deployment of network in businesses, the mentioned problems were limited to the privacy of people. After businesses involved networking in their operations, problem was no more limited to the identity of a person but rather reached to financial and confidential aspects of a business.
Enterprise Applications need to be secured and in order to cope up with these problems; information ciphering methods were introduced to encrypt the information to be transferred over wire. While encryption algorithms certainly facilitate this transmission up to some extent, the deployment of correct algorithm in specific context in necessary.
• Data Encryption Standard (DES) is a private-key system based encryption techniques, where both the sender and the receiver possess a unique key to decipher the message called known as the private-key. This algorithm ciphers a 64-bit block of data with a 56-bit cipher key, which means in every 1-byte (or 8-bit) of data, DES uses 7-bits to cipher or encrypt and ignores 8th bit. It is generally used for hardware implementation and discouraged for using in software. However, its evolved version, the triple-DES is used in this case.
• RSA, named after its inventors Rivest, Shamir and Adleman, belongs to a public key cryptography system. In this encryption scheme, the key used to decrypt the message could be different from the key used for encrypting the message. However, only the owner of the message can encrypt the message using the private exponent of the key whereas, the public exponent of the key is published and is used to decrypt the message. This technique forms the basis of digital signature and is generally used in the same. In order to authenticate that message was created by the owner itself, the message is encrypted with the private key of the owner. At receivers end, the message is decrypted with the public key of the owner in order to verify if it was created by the same person.
• Hashing is another encryption technique used to condense the result of input string by applying some operations using parameters called as hash parameters. The result thus obtained is called as HASH. The hash, also called as message digest, is derived using a formula applied on a string in such a way that it is unlikely to reproduce the result by applying the same parameter or different on some other string. It is generally used to store passwords of clients or users in database because it is highly dangerous to store the passwords as it is. So, the hash of the original password is stored in the repository and whenever a user inputs his password, hash function generates its hash and server matches the two results and if they match, user is logged in successfully with absolute authentication.
• SHA-1 is a hashing algorithm which produces a digest or hash of size 120-bits. The digest size is so large that the event of the two messages being the same is highly unlikely. This encryption technique is used in OpenSSL toolkit for implementing protocols like SSL and TSL. SSL and TSL protocols are used to secure the information transfer during an authentication session on web-pages.
The encryption techniques are not only limited to the mentioned ones but there are other techniques used to securely transfer data and even secure whole of the LAN for a business or organization. IPsec, SSL VPN and WPA2 are some security protocols which mostly iOS applications use to secure the communication between an Apple’s device and Apple’s server.
About the Author
Christa Joe is the author of this article. She has been writing articles for Software development companies like Q3 Technologies. Moreover, she has been providing useful content writing material related to Windows mobile development & Cloud Applications
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