Security via Technology

Security via Technology

Introduction

The communication sector is doing well by fulfilling the requirements of rising global trade environment. All the authorities are focused on meeting the needs of the industries. Meeting industrial needs means use of open interfaces and protocols, various applications and platforms; thus the procedures or processes to bring in practice are not enough verified. This has given rise to the opportunities for using network for bad activities. Security threat is one of the greatest challenges of the global networks. Security is a term that is motivated by privacy. Generally privacy is understood as a right on an individual to monitor and safeguard the information associated with them. It is about the authority that an individual enjoys when it comes to storing or disclosing information. Technically privacy could be related to terms like cryptography (ITU, 2003).

Cryptography

Cryptography is a merge of mathematics and security engineering. It encloses all the modern security tools. It is a very significant technology for securing systems (Caesar et.al, p. 73). Today's cryptography goes beyond encryption and decryption.

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The field of cryptography is vast, and with few tools many protocols and schemes could be built that allows sharing of information without exposing the information itself.

Public-Key Cryptography

Another cryptographic mechanism is the public key. It is so named as to make it distinguishable from the conventional cryptographic mechanism that is the symmetric key. Unlike symmetric key mechanism public-key make use of key pairs. One key is for encryption while the other is for decryption. This mechanism of cryptography provides countless advantages over the symmetric-key mechanism which uses same keys both for encryption and decryption. Public-key uses a public key and a private key. This asymmetric key pair is used both for encryption and decryption. The public key is publically available, whereas the private key is never disclosed and is always kept secretly. Encrypted data with a public key could only de decrypted with its private key and for data encryption via private keys decryption could only be done through its public key. This feature helps in the implementation of encryption and digital signal (CGI, 2004, p. 3).

Encryption and Decryption

Encryption is about transforming the data into such text that could only be deciphered by the sender and the recipient. Consider for example Alice wishes to deliver a secret text to Bob. For sending this text she needs Bob's public key which is publically seen by all so Bob would fling his public key to Alice without any fears. After acquiring Bob's public key Alice encrypts the text making use of Bob's public key. Bob on receiving the message would decrypt the message using his private key (CGI, 2004, p. 4).

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Digital Signal and Verification

Digital signal provides authentication to the message. It ensures that the message comes effectively from the sender. If Alice wishes to deliver a digitally signed message to Bob, she would encrypt the message utilizing her private key. The message is afterwards sent to Bob with Alice's public ...