Cryptography

Let's become familiar with cryptography!

What is Cryptography and Why is it important?

Cryptography is a method of protecting information and communications through the use of codes.

Cryptography is very important when it comes to internet security. Without encryption communications over the internet will be very insecure, and it would be very easy for someone to see your data. Fortunately this isn't true, and almost all of the data you get/send over the internet is encrypted and cannot be seen in plain text by someone who got access to it.

Types of cryptography

There are two types of cryptography: symmetric and asymmetric.

In symmetric cryptography users have the same key to encrypt and decrypt the messages.

In asymmetric cryptography encryption and decryption keys are different. The encryption key can only be used for encryption and so can decryption. The encryption key is called a public key and the decryption key is called a private key.

Virtually, asymmetric cryptography is more secure than symmetric cryptography because you have two different keys that works in only either encryption or decryption. However, when it comes to speed, symmetric cryptography is way faster than asymmetric.

What is a Hash?

Hashes are a long strings of letters and numbers generated by hashing algorithms. They take plain text and make it a hash. Hashes are not reversible meaning that you can't decrypt/decode them. There are many different types of hashing algorithms like SHA and MD4/5. In Linux, you can identify what type of hash it is by using hash-identifier.

Try generating random md5 hash: https://www.md5hashgenerator.com/

You can decode/encode anything you want in here:https://www.dcode.fr/hash-function

If you already know what type of hash your hash is, then look at the similar pages and select.

Deconding/Encoding

Encoding and encryption are totally different to each other. They are not the same! To understand it, let's say you have an encrypted file. The only way to decrypt it is using a key. However, encoded data can be decoded immediately without keys. Encoding is just a way of representing data.

check out this website if you want to encode/decode anything: https://www.base64encode.org/

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