Public Key Encryption
Encryption is the process of disguising information by transforming plain text into gibberish, otherwise known as cyphertext, which cannot be understood by unauthorized persons. Likewise, decryption is the process of transforming cyphertext back into plaintext that can be read by anyone. Examples of encryption can be found throughout history. In the cold war era, the Soviet Union and United States would send electronic messages from a specific military installation to another, but only on an encrypted basis. If the enemy intercepted the message, they would have to decypher the message in order to get the information. Typically when governments use encryption they use a very complex method of encrypting the data. Encryption doesn't have to be complex - the "Captain Video Decoder Rings" we had as children used a simplified encryption method. First, you'd encode your secret message, such as "Meet me by the swings," by replacing the letters of the alphabet with substitute letters from a from a specified position in the alphabet. Let's say we decide to use the key "+4"; using this method, we'd switch each letter in our message with the letter that comes four places later in the alphabet. D would become H; R would become V, and so o
In May 1976, collaborating with Stanford computer scientist Martin Hellman, Diffie cracked both problems and his scheme was called public-key cryptography. It was a brilliant breakthrough. Every user in the system has two keys - a public key and a private key. The public key can be widely distributed without compromising security; the private key, however, is held more closely than an ATM password, and you don't grant access to anybody. For relatively secret mathematical reasons, a message encoded with either key can be decoded with the other. For instance, if I want to send you a secure letter, I encrypt it with your public key (which I received from you), and send you the cyphertext and you decipher it using your private key. Likewise, if you send a message to me, you can encrypt it with my public key, and I'll switch it back to plaintext with my private key. This principle can also be used for authentication. Only one person can encrypt text with my private key, and that's me. If you can decode a message with my public key, you know beyond a doubt that it's straight from my machine to yours. The message bears my digital signature. By 1977, three members of this new community created a set of algorithms that implemented the Diffie-Hellman scheme. Called RSA for its founders - MIT scientists Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman - it offered encryption that was likely to be stronger than the Data Encryption Standard (DES), a government approved alternative that doesn't use public keys. The DES system is limited to a key size of 56 bits; RSA keys can be any size. The larger a key, the harder it is to crack, although with an increase in key size, the system runs slower. The RSA algorithms were eventually patented and licensed to RSA Data Security, such businesses as Apple, Microsoft, WordPerfect, Novell, and AT&T implemented the RSA software into there system.
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1287
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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