Implications of Encryption

[Name of the institute] Implications of Encryption

Introduction

The world has evolved dynamically and so are its approaches and perceptions. Privacy and secrecy have to be maintained and guarded against the illegal intrusion. Even in olden days people have appeared to be concerned about the secrecy of their messages and used code words. Cryptography is a mean to acquire protection of information by converting it or encrypting the information into certain form that appears unreadable to the intruders to the system. This certain format is called 'cipher text'. According to Buchmann (2004), the access is given to only those users who have the required secret key and they can decipher or decrypt the unreadable format into plain text. Many public and private organizations have realized the need to have some means to protect their data from being breached by illegal users. One can see cryptography used in ATM cards, passwords in computers and in various electronic or e-commerce. This paper aims to paper aims to explore the application of cryptography while selecting the most appropriate system type.

Purpose of Cryptography

The prime purpose of cryptography is to render the required protection to the data against any kind of expected or unexpected infringement. It functions as a third party in order to make sure that the exchange of data between the two parties is guarded and not illegal breaching should take place. It also ensures that integrity of the data should remain active and no party may complain about altering the provided data (Jarmusz, 2013). When the two parties make an agreement on exchange of data they must also have reliability on each other. There is another aspect called non-repudiation which ensures that only the intended receiver must receive the message. When the receiver gets the message, he is able to decrypt the data and only 'he should be able to decipher or decrypt the message and no one else'. This is mean of identifying and recognizing the actual receivers to keep the business between the two.

Differences between Symmetric and Asymmetric Encryption

According to Jarmusz (2013), symmetric encryption is one of the oldest and well-known approaches. It uses a secret that can be utilized to apply protection on the text to counter any unwanted change in any unfavorable mean. This secret key can be a number, a letter or a word. The message is readable when the two parties, receivers and senders both are aware of the actual secret key. There is one drawback within this approach that all the involving parties have to share the secret key that again is a sensitive exchange. Many a times, during the exchange of secret key some illegal actions copy the code.

Asymmetric encryption has been introduced to counter the disadvantage prevailing in the exchange of keys. Under this approach, there are two discrete associated keys or a pair key. One is public that is easily available to anyone and the other is private key that is used only privately. A text that is encrypted by ...