Question

Describe situations in your life when you might need to use encryption or secret codes. How important would it be to have enough understanding of the subject of cryptography to assess the strength of the code you used?

Answer 1

The situations in the daily life where there is need of encryption is given as follows :

In our day to day life, we can encounter a number of situations where there is need of security or privacy and cryptography is used. Many such situations can be as follows :

1. Cash withdrawal from an ATM.
2. Email encryption.
3. Secure web browsing.
4. Secure communication channels.
5. In order to use secure VPN (Virtual private network).

PGP refers to “pretty good privacy” and is a very common cryptographic process that uses both symmetric and asymmetric types of cryptography in order to encrypt the private data so that third person is unable to access it. In order to do so, it uses two-level key hierarchy in which one level has symmetric session keys which are used to protect data, and the second level is where there are asymmetric keys which are used for both signature protection and for the protection of the symmetric session keys that is used in the first level.

It is importance to have the knowledge of cryptography because of the following reasons :

Since, the level of encryption depends upon the importance of data that is to be protected. It means if some data is very sensitive and can be very harmful if illegally used or misused, then there should be high level of encryption on that data and to know the strength of code that is being used to encrypt in order to protect the data, one must have the knowledge of cryptography. There are different levels of encryptions that are being used depending upon the data which is to be protected. An encryption technique known as ‘RSA’ is said to be the most powerful encryption that supports incredible key lengths and is used to provide encryption to protect data and maintain privacy while using web browsers, chat communications and emails etc.