Get Tech: Understand Computers, the Internet and Cut Through the AI Hype. A crash course for non-techie entrepreneurs. by Emmanuel Maggiori

Author:Emmanuel Maggiori [Maggiori, Emmanuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-12-05T23:00:00+00:00

9

Encryption

Internet messages travel around the world through wires and Wi-Fi signals. An intruder could easily tap into those channels to snoop into other people’s private communication. A really wicked eavesdropper could even alter the content of the intercepted message, causing serious trouble. Communicating through the Internet is as private as writing a message on a postcard: everyone can read it along the way, including the postman, your neighbors and your housemates.

Your business is likely to receive sensitive data from clients over the Internet, such as their credit card numbers or personal ID information. It is also likely to send sensitive data to clients and other businesses, such as invoices and account balances. You wouldn’t want any intruders to read those messages. In this chapter, we’ll see how online communication is secured and I’ll share my advice for keeping you and your customers safe.

Encryption

If you want to send a message to a friend but keep it a secret, you have to obscure it in a way that only you and your friend know. For example, you could replace every letter in the original message with the next letter in the alphabet. “A” becomes “B,” “B” becomes “C,” and so on. By using this strategy, the word “hello” is transformed into this apparent nonsense:

ifmmp

A snooper isn’t able to understand the actual content of your message. This process is known as encryption. Your friend can easily decrypt the message by “undoing” the encryption algorithm, replacing every letter by the previous one in the alphabet. “C” becomes “B,” “B” becomes “A,” and so on.

The problem with this approach is that the secrecy lies in the encryption algorithm itself. Anyone who knows the technique to encode the letters can crack the message.

The solution is to add a password or key to the mix. Suppose that, instead of jumping one letter in the alphabet, you use a secret key to indicate how many letters to jump. For example, key “5” means that you skip five letters in the alphabet. The same message is encrypted in different ways depending on the key:

hello + key 1 = ifmmp

hello + key 2 = jgnnq

Your friend needs to know the value of this key in order to properly apply the decryption algorithm and read the original message. Knowing the encryption algorithm itself is of little value without the key. In fact, everyone could agree on using the same algorithm, but they would make sure that only the intended recipient knows the key. The overall process looks as follows:

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