Why do we need to encrypt our data?

When Julius Caesar sent messages to his Generals, he replaced every ‘A’ with a ‘D’; every ‘B’ with an ‘E’ and so on, so that some foreigner could not get his secret message. Only someone who knew the “shift by 3” rule could decipher his messages.

So, that gives us one good fine reason as to why do we need to keep our confidential data secure.

The military forces of all the nations share some secret data amongst themselves and if the information is leaked out it may end up a very big loss for their land; which may end up in the state of war.
The Banks, E-Mail servers, Social Media Companies, Government agencies etc. encrypt their data for the value of their customers. The big industries encrypt their data for the value of their company. In short, every organisation secures its data. From the OTP (One Time Password) your credit card company sends every time you use your card to the WhatsApp’s one-to-one encryption of every message you send; you are living in a virtual land and the data is travelling aside you in some gibberish form which you can never read unless you have the decryption key.

The basic algorithm for a cryptosystem is to first convert the given text into ASCII code and then to binary form. An encrypting function is then applied onto the binary string and then the binary text is converted back to the plain text which is not readable to others.

The above steps are then inverted to get back the message; but only the person who has the decryption key can read that message back.

The term cryptography has also expanded to include more than just the processes of encrypting and decrypting messages in order to hide messages from an outside observer.  Cryptography allows us to form digital signatures, characterize a large message by a small message (or digest), and even more complex things like distributed currency.

The credit for the modern cryptology can be given to the three people who laid down the basis of computations – Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman. The algorithm (RSA Algorithm) created by them is used as the foundation of almost all the cryptosystems.

Recently works are being done over Homomorphic Encryption in which the data is encrypted more than once but the same encrypted message is decrypted back just by a single function. The present techniques have some of the following limitations:

·         It is computationally expensive due to its dependence on Public Key Infrastructure

·         It does not preserve the order of the outsourced data so it cannot execute range queries.

·         It does not support the availability service.

To overcome these limitations a new system is being developed.

“Cryptosystem over Boolean Rings” uses Boolean Rings, as the base for all the computations, on the Matrices and Latin Square space to make it more difficult for the third-party person to break into the code. The system is being developed by Prof. N. Chandramowliswaran and Rishabh Malhotra of Amity University Gurgaon.

Modern cryptography includes anything that guards itself through difficulty of computation rather than secrecy of information. Modern cryptography hides in plain sight.

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Rishabh Malhotra (rish.malhotra1996@gmail.com)