Information is one of the most prized assets that the modern world works with and it fuels businesses and internet organizations alike. It enables them to make sense out of the many varied transactions that internet users make on a daily basis and ensures that all the decisions that customers and businesses make about trade are well informed. A better-informed decision that has been powered by the correct information will not have to impacted or affected in any way. The information passing through the information channels on the internet is usually secured in a manner that prevents any third parties from finding out the meaning of the information and this is what is known as encryption.
Basically, encryption is the form of information security that turns legible information into something that sounds like gibberish and is completely useless to anyone who reads it. The gibberish is also impossible to crack as the process of encrypting the information takes into consideration a certain length key which determines the strength of the encryption. A shorter key can be easier to crack which is the reason modern encryption makes use of long keys that are incredibly hard to crack and the security cannot be easily broken.
The encoding of the information might remain the same during the encryption and decryption process as the data type has to be preserved for the information to be easily presented once it has been received by the recipient. It makes sense to have the encryption turn the encoding into a format that is totally unreadable and useless for the third parties that might chance upon the information.
Internet attackers and other online criminals might tap or listen into the communication that takes place between two internet parties and with the power of encryption, they will be unable to break the meaning of the information as it has already been turned into a format only a legal recipient can find out the meaning of. Decoding takes place at the side of the receiver and this is where the gibberish is turned into the logical representation of the information.
No matter the amount or size of information that has been encrypted and sent over an internet connection to the recipient, the decryption takes much less time with the correct key as the verification breaks down the decryption time significantly. For the hackers, they will have to spend ages breaking down the key during which a lot of computing resources will have been spent and the key might probably not even be found in the end.
Information security is important for a healthy and safe internet and in this day and age, the number of internet threats is increasing which calls for security mechanisms to keep the information safe. Encryption has been identified as one of the means of keeping information secure as it breaks down the information into a format that is impossible to read unless one has got the correct key to open and decrypt the information.
