Question

Explain encryption technology.

Answer 1

1. Encryption technology is an effective information security protection.
2. It is defined as converting a Plaintext into meaningless Ciphertext using an encryption algorithm thus ensuring the confidentiality of the data.
3. The encryption or decryption process uses a key to encrypt or decrypt the data.

Types:

At present, two encryption technologies are widely used. They are:

1. Symmetric key encryption system
2. Asymmetric key encryption system.

• Symmetric key encryption – Data Encryption Standard (DES):

1. It is a Symmetric-key data encryption method.
2. It is the typical block algorithm that takes a string of bits of clear text (plaintext) with a fixed length into another encrypted text of the same length.
3. It also uses a key to customize the transformation, so that, in theory, the algorithm can only be deciphered by people who know the exact key that has been used for encryption.
4. The DES key is apparently 64 bits, but in fact, the algorithm uses only 56. The other eight bits are only used to verify the parity and then it is discarded.
5. The key length increased by multiple uses of the DES, described as Triple-DES, also known as TDES, 3DES or DESede.

• Asymmetric or Public key encryption

1. It is also called as RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) algorithm.
2. It uses public-key authentication and digital signatures.
3. Each user generates their own key pair, which consists of a private key and a public key.
4. A public-key encryption method is a method for converting a plaintext with a public key into a ciphertext from which the plaintext can be retrieved with a private key.