What is encryption?
Encryption is a technique for transforming information on a computer in such a way that it becomes unreadable. So, even if someone is able to gain access to a computer with personal data on it, they likely won’t be able to do anything with the data unless they have complicated, expensive software or the original data key. The basic function of encryption is essentially to translate normal text into ciphertext. Encryption can help ensure that data doesn’t get read by the wrong people, but can also ensure that data isn’t altered in transit, and verify the identity of the sender.
3 different encryption methods
There are three different basic encryption methods, each with their own advantages (list courtesy of Wisegeek):
Hashing
Hashing creates a unique, fixed-length signature for a message or data set. Each “hash” is unique to a specific message, so minor changes to that message would be easy to track. Once data is encrypted using hashing, it cannot be reversed or deciphered. Hashing, then, though not technically an encryption method as such, is still useful for proving data hasn’t been tampered with.
Symmetric methods
Symmetric encryption is also known as private-key cryptography, and is called so because the key used to encrypt and decrypt the message must remain secure, because anyone with access to it can decrypt the data. Using this method, a sender encrypts the data with one key, sends the data (the ciphertext) and then the receiver uses the key to decrypt the data.
Asymmetric methods
Asymmetric encryption, or public-key cryptography, is different than the previous method because it uses two keys for encryption or decryption (it has the potential to be more secure as such). With this method, a public key is freely available to everyone and is used to encrypt messages, and a different, private key is used by the recipient to decrypt messages.
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