Encryption Terminologies Developers Must Know (2023)

What is encryption?

What if every information you revealed to someone else was a secret? That is what encryption is all about; it is the best security technique for defending your private data. Data is converted into an unreadable format when encrypted; only those with the proper key can decipher it. 

Encryption algorithms, often called cyphers, are mathematical formulas to encode and decode messages. These cyphers operate together with a component called a key, which serves as the secret ingredient in the encryption formula. Anyone without the key has a difficult challenge when attempting to decode the data because the key controls how the data is jumbled. It makes sense that governments and militaries have employed encryption throughout history to protect their data from unauthorised people.

Why is encryption necessary?

The security of our personal and sensitive data has grown to be a critical concern in today’s digital environment. Encryption has developed into a crucial instrument for maintaining the confidentiality, authentication, integrity, and non-repudiation of our digital communication and transactions due to the rise in cyberattacks, data breaches, and identity theft. 

Encryption protects our data against prying eyes, hackers, and other nefarious actors who want to steal, manipulate, or abuse it. Encryption makes it nearly difficult for unauthorised parties to read or access a message by encoding its content. Moreover, encryption ensures that the message’s sender is confirmed and authorised, preventing any impersonation or alteration of the message’s content. While encryption ensures that the message’s contents haven’t been altered, the message’s integrity is likewise maintained.

In order to safeguard our digital assets, preserve our privacy, and secure our sensitive data from online attacks, encryption is crucial. It ensures that the message’s contents haven’t been changed or updated since it was sent, which helps retain its integrity. Non-repudiation, which assures the sender cannot deny sending the message, offers trustworthy and dependable proof of communication.

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How is encryption used?

Encryption is a crucial tool in protecting sensitive information from prying eyes. It is a powerful safeguard for data in transit and at rest, keeping information secure as it travels across the internet or rests on a device. Whether safeguarding your financial information during an ATM transaction or securing your online purchases, encryption is critical in protecting your digital life.

Businesses rely heavily on encryption to safeguard their sensitive information, preventing reputational damage and financial loss from data breaches. The three essential components of an encryption system – the data, the encryption engine, and the critical management – work together to provide a secure environment for information. In today’s world, where data breaches and cyber-attacks are becoming more common, encryption is vital in protecting sensitive information and ensuring it stays secure. Encryption ensures the intactness of the message’s contents, thus maintaining its integrity. It is crucial to safeguard our digital assets, preserve our privacy, and secure our sensitive data from online attacks.

How does encryption work?

Encryption transforms plain text or data into an unintelligible format known as ciphertext to prevent information from being intercepted or accessed by unauthorised persons. A message’s encryption and decryption are managed by a key, which is nothing but information. Public and private keys are used in asymmetric encryption, which uses two unique but connected keys. Using symmetric key encryption, the message’s sender and recipient utilise the same key for encoding and decoding. 

Asymmetric encryption encrypts the communication using the recipient’s public key, and only the recipient’s private key can decrypt the message. Asymmetric and symmetric encryption techniques are combined in many encryption schemes to increase security. Encryption is used chiefly to maintain the privacy of digital information kept on computer systems or sent over networks like the internet or a local area network. Encryption is frequently used to comply with compliance requirements and stop threat actors from accessing sensitive data.

Encrypting the data may indeed look enticing, but it comes with its own set of drawbacks. Let us now talk about the disadvantages associated with encryption:

What are the disadvantages of encryption?

Encryption can be a double-edged sword as it prevents authorised parties and data owners from accessing the protected material. Key management puts enterprise encryption tactics in jeopardy since hackers are aware of where to seek for keys to decrypt the ciphertext. Despite best practices for key management, it complicates backup and restoration operations, which could slow down the recovery efforts in the event of a disaster. Administrators must develop a thorough plan to back up keys separately and store them in a form that makes them retrievable in a significant disaster to guarantee that critical management systems are secure.

Let us now talk about some encryption terminologies that developers must know:

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Important Encryption Terminologies For Developers

1. Bring Your Own Encryption (BYOE): BYOE is a cloud computing security model that lets users manage their encryption keys and use their encryption software. Customers can use this strategy to install a virtualised instance of their own encryption software and the business application they are hosting in the cloud.
2. Column-Level Encryption: With column-level encryption, every cell in a given column has a unique password that can only be used to access, read, and write that cell’s data.
3. Deniable Encryption: Depending on the decryption key used, deniable encryption is a type of cryptography that allows an encrypted text to be decrypted in two or more different ways. When a sender anticipates communication interception or even welcomes it, they may employ this strategy to spread false information.
4. End-to-end encryption (E2EE): End-to-end encryption ensures that information sent between two parties cannot be accessed by an attacker who intercepts the communication channel. This strategy is often accomplished between web client and web server software using an encrypted communication circuit, such as Transport Layer Security (TLS).
5. EaaS subscription model: Customers of cloud services can benefit from the security that encryption provides through an EaaS subscription model. With the help of this strategy, customers who lack the skills to handle encryption on their own can meet regulatory compliance issues and safeguard data in a multi-tenant environment. 
6. Cloud Storage Encryption: Cloud storage providers offer encryption as a service, which involves encrypting text or data before it is uploaded to the cloud. This strategy is nearly identical to in-house encryption; the only distinction is that the cloud client must become familiar with the provider’s policies and procedures for encryption and essential management to match encryption with the sensitive level of the data being kept.
7. Field-Level Encryption: With field-level encryption, you can encrypt the data in particular fields on a website. Sensitive data, including credit card numbers, social security numbers, bank account numbers, and details about a person’s health, wages, and financial information, can be protected using this method. 
8. Homomorphic Encryption: Homomorphic encryption is the process of encoding data into ciphertext that can be analysed and used like the original data. This method makes it possible to operate on encrypted data in a complicated mathematical way without affecting the encryption.
9. HTTPS: HTTPS enables website encryption by routing HTTP through the TLS protocol. A public key certificate must be installed on the web server for it to be able to encrypt all of the content it sends. 
10. Link-Level Encryption: This type of encryption encrypts data before it leaves the host, decrypts it at the following link, which could be a host or a relay point, and then re-encrypts it before sending it to the following link. 
11. Network-Level Encryption: Network-level encryption applies crypto services at the network transfer layer, which is higher than the data link layer but lower than the application layer. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETFopen )’s Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) standards, which establish a foundation for confidential communication over IP networks, are used to implement this strategy.
12. Full-Disk Encryption (FDE): Full-Disk Encryption is hardware-based encryption. This method operates by automatically transforming data stored on a hard disc into an incomprehensible format to anyone who does not possess the key to reverse the conversion.
13. Quantum Cryptography: Data protection with quantum cryptography is based on the quantum mechanical characteristics of particles. With this method, data can be encoded in a way that makes it impossible to copy it. Any effort to access the encoded data will cause it to change, alerting the parties permitted to access the encryption to an attack.

Summing Up:

Our digital security is built on encryption for our emails, texts, or online transactions. If you are someone who is already aware of some or most of these terminologies, we hope this blog helped you revisit your concepts. But for someone new to the world of encryption terminologies, understanding them would help you better understand the intricacy and significance of encryption in our daily lives. Data security is a war today, and encryption is probably the only way to win it. With this knowledge, we can actively protect our online security and privacy and keep ourselves ahead of online attackers.