Mar 25•3 min read
Crypto Comics - What is Encryption
I shared my thoughts about Encryption.
TL;DR
I shared what encryption is and how to use it in real life.
Some Takeaway
Encryption is a way to hide information that you want to share with only people you want to. In the technical term, you turn plaintext into ciphertext that disguises its original intent and information into some incomprehensible text that no one knows.
Random
To become encryption, the text has to be as random as possible. Unfortunately, a human comes up with the idea in a logical and predictable way that it is easy for another human being to break into the message and steal the information. By that means, one can create as random as possible but he or she has to be able to apply this randomness to decrypt the code which makes it more difficult.
Ancient Way of Randomness
Dated back to ancient Egyptian time, to become random is to replace text with symbols. Without a computer, one has to try as much of a combination of as many types of language as possible to crack the code which seems a daunting task until the computer was introduced. That cipher technique becomes obsolete under the computer’s power.
Enigma Machine - Machine of Randomness
During World War II, Enigma Machine had been used for Nazi communication until it was cracked by British codebreakers including Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman. Enigma Machine was known as unbreakable because of its complex combination of letters. The idea of the key was introduced which makes the decryption harder with significantly increasing the combination of possible outcomes. However, because of the combination of human errors in the operation and the machine's fundamentally design flaw to reveal its initial position, allies decoding teams could easily guess the encrypted message which helped them to win World War II.
Modern Internet
Nowadays, encryption is widely used on the internet. The speed of computers has been dramatically increased ever since which makes many encryption algorithms possible to break. New ways of encryption with more advanced technology have been introduced.
Future Encryption
However, nuclear development of encryption is underway. Quantum computing is a new technology that will dramatically make the computer speed into quantum speed. It will make all existing encryption obsolete. The theory describes the computer speed to increase from the 2 to the possible numbers of power which catch-all combinations of existing encryption and drastically shorten the decryption time.
In conclusion
Encryption is a way to hide your message that only want to share with specific people. It is a core technology embedded in cryptocurrency.
Photo by Mauro Sbicego on Unsplash
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