PCI- Encryption Principles Lesson

Encryption Principles

A huge amount of private data is sent around the Internet every day: emails with details about our personal lives, passwords that we type into login screens, or even documents we upload online. The Internet protocols send private data in packets on the same routes as everyone else's data, and unfortunately, attackers have figured out ways to look at the data moving around the Internet.

Think about how you could limit the possibilities of your information falling into the wrong hands.

The concept of encryption can shed light on a possible solution. Encrypting data means that we scramble the original data to hide the meaning of the text, while still making it possible for the data to be unscrambled using a secret key. Encryption enables two people (or computers!) to share private information over open networks.

In this lesson you will learn more about the concepts of encryption and how they are applied to ensure data security.

First, Take a look at this video to see how encryption works. Encryption and Public Keys video.

Now that you have had the opportunity to understand encryption. It is fair to say that it is necessary to keep that data secure online. Let’s review a couple of additional concepts not mentioned in the video to get a full picture of how encryption works.

As learned from the video, encryption is the scrambling or changing of a message to hide it. When encrypting and decrypting information, cryptography is a practice of coding information to ensure only the person that a message was written for can read and process the information.

A couple of techniques to also think about in encryption is hashing and steganography.

• Hashing is the practice of taking a string or input key, a variable created for storing narrative data, and representing it with a hash value, which is typically determined by an algorithm and constitutes a much shorter string than the original.
• Steganography is the practice of hiding a secret message inside of something that is not secret; the main purpose of steganography is to conceal and deceive.

Now you have learned how encryption works and why it is necessary to protect our data online.

Complete the following Encryption self-assessment.

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