--Originally published at Allow Yourself to fail and learn… and hack
Cryptography is not a new technique at all, encrypting message has been a thing since many many years ago. This because of the need of humans to share message privately. Protecting important and delicate information that could be misused on hands of wrong people. Nowadays the story and the context is different. There still exist cases in which information has to be protected because of the importance it contains, but now that there are millions of people sharing information on the web. The need for protecting this information is more of a concern due to privacy and protection of personal information. It passed from being a technique used by a few, to a tool provided to the masses.
To understand encryption there are 3 main things we need to distinguish.
Encrypting:
There’s the Encryption part, where the message we need to share has to be protected by a lock, a lock that only sender and receiver know how to open.
Decrypting:
Then when the receiver gets the message he has to open the lock to understand the message, to open it he use the method sender and receiver share.
Cipher
Instead of using physical locks, this is the thing that nowadays we use to lock our messages.
Some common Cryptography methods:
Symmetric Key cryptography:
AKA shared key cryptography involves 2 people using the same key to encrypt and decrypt the information
Public key cryptography:
Makes use of 2 different keys: a public key for encryption, so than anyone can encrypt a message and send it, and then a private key, which able only one person to open the messages encrypted by the public key.
At the end, everything is prompt to be hacked and obtained, therefore the best we can do is to
Extra: I found an excellent course on khan Academy where you can learn a lot about cryptography by yourself.
https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-science/cryptography/crypt/v/intro-to-cryptography
