Encryption, also known as encryption, is arguably the most important link when it comes to online security. You are already using it unconsciously. How do you secure encryption, and how do you make the best use of it yourself?
Encryption takes place everywhere in our digital lives. The green lock when you securely log in to a site in your browser? This guarantees that your data is sent encrypted. When you open a WhatsApp conversation, the app notifies you that your conversation is safe thanks to encryption.
But how does encryption actually secure? In principle, the data is shuffled, only with the right key your device is able to recover the shuffled data readable again. Let’s take your smartphone as a practical example: when configuring your smartphone – whether it is an iPhone or Android – you must enter a password. This can be a password, PIN or an unlock pattern. This is an example of such a key. The data on your phone cannot be read until you enter the key. For example, someone who steals your phone cannot access the data on your device without a key. Not even if you were to remove the data storage chip from the smartphone.
When transferring data, such as WhatsApp and the green lock (https). Are there multiple keys, on both the receiving devices and the transmitting device. If the sending device uses its own encryption and the key is only available on a receiving device, then it is end-to-end encryption.
End-to-end encryption: the data is encrypted on the sending device, only the receiving device has the key.
Everything is encrypted
Encryption is essential for security. It guarantees that you can say things to others in confidence, without ad sellers, governments or other stalkers watching. Secure storage on your smartphone, secure banking, medical data transfer, DigiD. Everywhere it is ensured that encryption ensures that others cannot just access the data.
Encryption is also important to protect company data, by means of a VPN an encrypted connection is made between the work equipment and the company network. In areas with heavy internet censorship, encryption via VPN or the Tor network (which not only encrypts data traffic, but also routes random other users) encryption is essential to gather free information. Without governments being able to block you or see what you can do.
It is therefore not surprising that countries such as China ban encryption via VPN and Western governments and secret services often throw balls to ban or weaken encryption. Weakening would then have to be done by giving governments a kind of ‘master key’ (or back door). That doesn’t sound unreasonable, but it comes at the expense of everyone’s security, as a potential vulnerability is artificially added.
When is encryption safe?
The shuffling of data and decrypting it again naturally costs much more computing power from the systems. But with the necessary computing power, random keys can be generated to read the data anyway, by password crackers or other tools that the curious are happy to use. The harder the password, the harder it is to crack.
The encryption algorithms themselves must also be well programmed: preferably as random as possible and with public source code. This allows other experts to verify that there are no backdoors or errors in the code. That makes services like Signal, VeraCrypt, 7-Zip really reliable when it comes to encryption. BitLocker, Microsoft’s tool to protect disks and partitions via encryption, does not use open source code. As a result, it can never really be established whether your data is safe thanks to Bitlocker.
Get started with encryption yourself
If you want to learn more about how encryption works, how it is all processed and how you use encryption to protect your data against hackers, for example, you can contact the Tech Academy. The course bundle Secure with encryption makes sure you get to know everything.
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