Understanding Encryption

Transcript

Hello, my name is Malusi Faith and in this subsection of the third topic of Week 3 we will be looking at encryption as a means of securing our communication especially while online. We have seen encryption being mentioned quite a lot in week two’s content. Securing online communication depends a lot on whether data in transit is encrypted or not. Security is a major concern on the internet, especially when you’re using it to send sensitive information between parties. There’s a lot of information that we don’t want other people to see such as credit card information, social security numbers, private correspondence, personal details, sensitive company information and even bank-account information. Institutional data such as staff and student private information, institutional intellectual property and financial information should also be kept away from unauthorized parties. Providers of services that enable us to perform services like these have a mandate to protect our information from malicious actors and this is where encryption comes in.

So, what is encryption? Encryption is a process that encodes a message or file so that it can only be read by certain authorized people. It scrambles or encrypts data, and then uses a key for the receiving party to unscramble, or decrypt, the information. The message contained in an encrypted message is referred to as plaintext. In its encrypted, unreadable form it is referred to as ciphertext. For example, let’s say you want to send a secret message to your colleague. You would create a coded message in which each letter is substituted with the letter that is two steps down from it in the alphabet. So “A” becomes “C,” and “B” becomes “D” and so on and so forth. You have already told your colleague that the code is “Shift by 2”. Your friend gets the message and is then able to decode it. Anyone else who sees the message will see only nonsense. In this scenario, shifting the alphabet is the algorithm and ‘Shift by 2’ is the key that will be used to decode the ciphertext into plaintext.

Password protecting your school documents such as those with student grades, health or financial information of your students, teachers or school staff is an example of encryption. The password then becomes the key through which the information is retrieved. Additionally, there are online tools that can help in encrypting important and sensitive information. These tools have been added as part of the resources within this week’s content. So, all you need to do to make sure no one is able to access important information in transit is to ensure that you password protect your information and simply send the password securely to the recipient together with the scrambled file.

In the article which follows this video, we will look at different tools, which employ end to end encryption, that ensure secure communication online between parties.