The use of codes to secure information and communications in such a way that only the intended recipients can decipher and process them is known as cryptography. Hence, information access by unauthorized parties is prevented. “Crypto” means “hidden,” and “graphy” means “writing,” respectively.

Read more about Crypto from NewsInfotech

The methods used in cryptography to protect data are derived from mathematical ideas and a set of rule-based calculations known as algorithms to transform messages in ways that make them difficult to decode. These algorithms are employed in the creation of cryptographic keys, digital signatures, data privacy protection, online browsing on the internet, and the security of private transactions like debit and credit card purchases.

There are generally three different forms of cryptography:

Symmetric key encryption
It is an encryption technique where messages are encrypted and decrypted using the same shared key by both the sender and the recipient. Symmetric Key Systems are quicker and easier, but the issue is that the sender and receiver must securely exchange keys. Data Encryption System is the most widely used symmetric key encryption system (DES).

2. Hash functions

This algorithm uses no keys at all. It is impossible to reconstruct the contents of plain text since a fixed-length hash value is computed based on plain text. Hash functions are widely used in operating systems to secure passwords.

3. Asymmetric key cryptography

In this approach, information is encrypted and decrypted using a pair of keys. When encrypting data, a public key is used, and when decrypting data, a private key is used. Private Key and Public Key are distinct. Even if everyone knows the public key, only the intended recipient can decode the message because only he has access to the private key.

Techniques for Cryptography

In the age of computers, cryptography is frequently connected with the transformation of plain text into cipher text, which is text that can only be decoded by the intended recipient. This process is known as encryption. Decryption is the process of converting encrypted text to plain text.

By itself, cryptography cannot resolve any issues. For instance, symmetric encryption essentially converts your key management issue into a data confidentiality one. However, cryptography may be a crucial component of the strategy you use to meet your security objectives.

Quantum-safe encryption

As a pioneer in the field of quantum computing, IBM has already placed more than 30 systems into operation since 2016. In addition, the company recently published a hardware roadmap that outlines a clear route to commercially feasible quantum computers with 1,000 qubits and more. Even though the advantages of quantum computing are widely predicted, as the technology develops, many people are concerned about the security of present methods of encryption because of quantum computers’ greater ability to factor in big numbers.

IBM Research, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the larger cryptography community have been researching novel methods of encryption and data security over the past few years in an effort to protect sensitive data from quantum computers. According to NIST mathematician Dustin Moody, one worry is that someone might steal encrypted material and keep onto it until quantum computing has advanced sufficiently to break today’s encryption standards.

The good news is that researchers are working to create quantum-safe cryptography to thwart attempts to decrypt data using quantum computers. In order to protect data from quantum computers in the future, NIST established a competition called Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization in 2016.

Intricate mathematical puzzles (or algebraic structures) called lattices are used in lattice cryptography to conceal data; this technique is sometimes taught using the “knapsack issue.” The user would typically not notice any differences if today’s cryptography were replaced by lattices, other than perhaps a speed increase in performance.

2020 quantum-safe cryptography support for key management and application transactions was announced by IBM in November. IBM Cloud is also adding support for quantum-safe cryptography to facilitate application transactions. When running on Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud or IBM Cloud Kubernetes Services, cloud-native containerized apps can benefit from secure transport layer connections that offer quantum-safe cryptography for data-in-transit.

While not a panacea for privacy issues, cryptography is a useful tool.

One solution is to program the ICT systems to enforce rules like login processes and check your role before approving access or the ability to perform processing to prevent people from gaining access to data. This has long been the standard method of securing data while it is being used or processed.

Read more about Cryptocurrency  from NewsInfotech

But encryption has been a very useful technique when transporting data, whether in space when discussing communication or in time when discussing the storage. But, especially if we want to use the cloud, encryption has also developed into a technology used to enhance the security of solutions that secure data as it is processed.

Confidential computing: the benefits of using secure hardware

Returning to our concrete example, let’s imagine that sensitive data is dispersed across the papers being processed, making it difficult to employ anonymization or format-preserving encryption methods. The use of private computing technologies is one choice we have today. We can construct protected execution environments in the cloud with confidential compute hardware that allows us to perform specific processing activities with data and code but prevents other processes from accessing the data or even the code. The code and data in the protected execution environment are encrypted and integrity-protected from the outside.

Today, we have a few technologies for secret computing that are particularly helpful: IBM Pervasive encryption, AMD SEV, and Intel SGX. The manufacturer of the CPU technology found in virtually all devices, Arm, is introducing a solution for their particular class of processors. Confidential computing technologies have immense promise, and companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are already using them in their cloud computing platforms.

Software and private data are stored on the cloud, correct?

Isn’t all of this genuinely exciting? I very certainly think so. We are coming closer to having a good set of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) by integrating numerous strategies. These will safeguard AI and ML tools and enable us to perform computation in the public cloud for a variety of sensitive data types. De-identification might be viewed as too unreliable in the future for unstructured data, and even though they are slower, confidential computing and homomorphic computation solutions are simpler to implement as generic tools. Currently, a lot of intriguing developments are taking place in the fields of privacy and cryptography. I’m growing more sure that we will have solid technology to protect personal information/data when we process it in the cloud. Yes, cryptography is helpful in this situation.

Check out NewsInfotech