Encryption
Encryption is the process of converting data into a cipher using a key. The data is usually text and the encryption will give result to a meaningless message that will need a the key to view the true data rather than the encrypted meaningless cipher.
Encryption is used to secure data from any unauthorized access, i.e. the person who has the specific decryption key is needed to view the data. There are two types of encryption, symmetric and asymmetric.
Symmetric encryption uses a single key for encryption and decryption. Any person using this will need the same key to encrypt and decrypt data.
Asymmetric encryption uses two different keys, which is called the public key and the private key for encryption and decryption respectively.
The story of encryption is far more older than anyone think, but a very notorious scenario was the Enigma machine in World War II, where German war strategy messages were scrambled to be unreadable during transmission. But, in this we discuss about present time digital data encryption.
Earlier days most of the digital data is stored in a central place that is not connected to a network or the Internet, so the data cannot be accessed remotely and will need a physical presence to collect or tamper with the data. In those time data was also transfered physically. Later after the invention of Internet there was a high occurrence of data breaches and data theft, and it was also insecure to transmit data through the Internet. To solve this, the messages sent were encrypted in one end and then decrypted for viewing in the other end. Nowadays, encryption is a top priority in cyber field.
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