Cryptography - Everything you need to know about cryptography! by @themastergamer
Intro To Cryptography
We know in this era we store so much data online as well as on our devices and if we fall victim to any cyber-attacks and if this data falls in the wrong hands we have very big problems in our hands now. To avoid this cryptography --- encryption is utilised. Cryptography is the method we utilise to 🔐 secure data, Here only the person who the data is meant for ( owns the private keys) can access it. Let's split the word into two halves 'crypt' and 'graphy' where 'crypt' means hidden and ' graphy' means writing.
There are two primary main parts of cryptography:
✓ Encryption
✓ Decryption
✔️ Encryption: This isn't a creation of this age, we have seen this in many previous era's texts where they would replace some letters with another symbol/letter. Nowadays the same principle is applied but now we have much more complex algos(algorithms) which is used to scramble the data.
There are again mainly 2 types of encryption
-> Symmetric encryption: In this type of encryption both devices need to have the same key pre-installed before any interaction/ communication occurs.
-> Asymmetric encryption: This type of encryption follows the two-key approach which is a public and private key, their names explain their purposes pretty well. The private key is used in your main device to perform any transaction whereas the public key is used when the device needs to interact with any other device.
If you use WhatsApp .... You would have come across the term end to end encryption. To understand this, you need to understand how normal data is transferred - Usually, when you send a text it's encrypted till it's in the transit stage then on reaching its destination it loses a lot of its encryption. To avoid this we have end to end encryption like the name states one of the parties, in the end, the one that sends the message and the one that receives the message can read the message.
Finally, last but not least let's understand what decryption is.
✔️ Decryption: Encryption protected the data by encoding it but the recipient who receives the message should have the ability to decrypt it. What decryption does is does the opposite of what encryption does it " unencrypts " the data.
Some of the well-known decryption algos (algorithms are: Rsa, Aes, Twofish, Blowfish etc.)
Hope you learnt something new in this block, I tried to keep it very short and not dive into it very deep because it would get very technical. Let me know your thoughts on this topic in the comments :^)
