Let’s say that you’ve encrypted a message, put it in an envelope and sent it to your friend, Darryl. Hold onto your hats, because there are a few unavoidable technical terms coming up. Here are the main types of encryption that keep information secure both on the internet and in the real world.
Fortunately, this is changing as more websites switch to the encrypted version – Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS). More complicated codes developed over time, and by WWII, the British were using primitive electro-mechanical computers for the first time to help break codes.įast forward to the late 20th century and the beginnings of the internet, and it’s surprising to learn that encryption was hardly ever used at all.Įven now, a small but significant portion of internet traffic passes over HTTP – the web’s original transport protocol and the part of an internet which tells your browser you’re attempting to reach a website – in an unencrypted form. Your spouse can easily read the substitution-encrypted messages you pass to your paramour, and the mirror-writing in your secret diary can be understood using, well, a mirror. It’s fun, fast and will give you an idea of just how simple it can be to render plaintext into incomprehensible ciphertext.īut the ease with which they can be broken means that basic encryption methods are useless against a determined adversary who knows that these methods exist. They would be able to reason that the letter “j” probably represents either “a” or “i” and would have a complete, decoded solution in under 10 minutes. And to their great loss, the snooper will never know that Pixel Privacy is a great source of information.īut if someone were to spend time looking at the message and was aware of how substitution worked, it wouldn’t take them too long to figure it out – even without initially knowing by how many letters it had shifted. To a casual observer, peeking over your shoulder, that message is unreadable. The message “Pixel Privacy is a great source of information” would, with a shift of nine characters, become “Yrgnu Yarejlh rb j panjc bxdaln xo rwoxavjcrxw.” We use the term plaintext to describe a message that has not been encrypted and can be read easily, and ciphertext to describe a message that has been encrypted.Īlthough time consuming, it’s easy to use a Caesar cipher (or substitution cipher) to take a message and decide on how many letters the writer is going to shift down the alphabet. It can be as simple as writing words backwards using a mirror as Leonardo da Vinci used to practice, or shifting each letter in the alphabet by a set number of places à la Julius Caesar. What Encryption IsĮncryption is a way of disguising information so that anyone who shouldn’t have access to it can’t easily read or understand it. This will include 3DES, AES, RSA, TLS, PGP, IPsec and SSH. It’s what keeps your bank details out of criminal hands and your email secure.Įncryption technology has been in use since ancient times, and today I will be discussing its origins and how it is used today, as well as the most common and secure variations employed on the internet.
Encryption is vital to everyday life in the 21st century.