In a world where cybercrimes are on the rise, it’s comforting to know that there are as many methods available to protect network security as there are ways of trying to penetrate it. The real challenge is deciding which techniques an internet security expert should employ that best suits their organization’s specific situation.
Data encryption is a common and effective security method—a sound choice for protecting an organization’s information. However, there are a handful of different encryption methods available, so how do you choose?
Today we’re looking at the three most effective encryption techniques available for network security. But before we start our discussion on the effective data encryption techniques, let’s take a few moments and go over the fundamentals of data encryption.
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Noted antivirus and endpoint security experts at Kaspersky define encryption as “… the conversion of data from a readable format into an encoded format that can only be read or processed after it's been decrypted.”
They go on to say that encryption is considered the basic building block of data security, widely used by large organizations, small businesses, and individual consumers. It’s the most straightforward and crucial means of protecting information that passes from endpoints to servers.
Considering the elevated risk of cybercrime today, every person and group that uses the internet should be familiar with and incorporate basic encryption techniques, at the very least.
A woman wants to send her boyfriend a personal text, so she encrypts it using specialized software that scrambles the data into what appears to be unreadable gibberish. She then sends the message out, and her boyfriend, in turn, uses the correct decryption to translate it.
Thus, what starts out looking like this:
fUfDPzlyJu5LOnkBAf4vxSpQgQZltcz7LWwEtrughon5kSQIkQlZtfxtSTstut
q6gVX4SimlC3A6RDAhhL2FfhfoeimC7sDv9G1Z7pCNzFLp0lgAWWA9ACm8r44RZOBi
O5skw9cBZjZVfgmQ9VpFzSwzLLODhCU7/2THg2iDrW3NGQZfz3SSWviwCe7G
mNIvp5jEkGPCGcla4Fgdp/xuyewPk6NDlBewftLtHJVf
=RZx45
…eventually looks like this:
“I accidentally saw your web browser history. You and I are done.”
Fortunately, the keys do all the actual encryption/decryption work, leaving both people more time to contemplate the smoldering ruins of their relationship in total privacy.
Next, in our learning about effective encryption methods, let us find out why we need encryption.
If anyone wonders why organizations need to practice encryption, keep these four reasons in mind:
Let us now find out the important types of encryption methods.
There are several data encryption approaches available to choose from. Most internet security (IS) professionals break down encryption into three distinct methods: symmetric, asymmetric, and hashing. These, in turn, are broken down into different types. We’ll explore each one separately.
Also called private-key cryptography or a secret key algorithm, this method requires the sender and the receiver to have access to the same key. So, the recipient needs to have the key before the message is decrypted. This method works best for closed systems, which have less risk of a third-party intrusion.
On the positive side, symmetric encryption is faster than asymmetric encryption. However, on the negative side, both parties need to make sure the key is stored securely and available only to the software that needs to use it.
Also called public-key cryptography, this method uses two keys for the encryption process, a public and a private key, which are mathematically linked. The user employs one key for encryption and the other for decryption, though it doesn’t matter which you choose first.
As the name implies, the public key is freely available to anyone, whereas the private key remains with the intended recipients only, who need it to decipher the messages. Both keys are simply large numbers that aren’t identical but are paired with each other, which is where the “asymmetric” part comes in.
Finally, there’s hashing. Hashing generates a unique signature of fixed length for a data set or message. Each specific message has its unique hash, making minor changes to the information easily trackable. Data encrypted with hashing cannot be deciphered or reversed back into its original form. That’s why hashing is used only as a method of verifying data.
Many internet security experts don’t even consider hashing an actual encryption method, but the line is blurry enough to let the classification stand. The bottom line, it’s an effective way of showing that no one has tampered with the information.
Now that we have gone through the types of data encryption techniques, let us next learn the specific encryption algorithms.
There’s a host of different encryption algorithms available today. Here are five of the more common ones.
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