Cryptography and You

Buzzwords If you are under the impression that cryptography is some abstract science accessible and necessary to only those living under pervasive and invasive surveillance – the kind of which you seen on television, involving James Bond, espionage, flying bullets and car chases, you cannot be more mistaken!

Your own need for using cryptography might not be a matter of national security, as portrayed time and again in so many Hollywood movies. And your own experience of cryptography might hardly be as dramatic as exchanging secret messages in dark alleys, but at the crux of it, the bottom line is the same: ensuring that critical information remains confidential and reaches the hands of only the intended recipients during its transmission.

Today, cryptography has its wide reaching tentacles in almost every conceivable field. And since it is already so pervasive, it makes every sense for the common man to gain a better insight on what it is all about and to dispel the myths and notions accumulated from the cloak and dagger portrayals of cryptography by the mainstream media. It’s time to understand why cryptography is important to the average individual and simple things you can do to make it work for you.

Would you be willing to send all of your correspondence through mail on the back of a postcard which could potentially be read by anyone?

If your answer is a resounding NO, then cryptography is for you. All technical jargons aside, cryptography, at its most fundamental level, is an access control mechanism. It can allow you to control who should access what information of yours. Cryptography can be handy to you for various personal and professional reasons. If you are into business, then it makes sense to keep your marketing strategies, business plans and research information confidential and away from the hands of your competitors. Similarly, authors and journalists might want to keep their killer ideas to themselves until get to work on it. In the personal front, one might want to use cryptography to keep their medical records, bank account information, passwords and other personal assets secret. One can even keep their diary a secret from their snooping siblings!

Therefore, as we can see there are plenty of non-criminal reasons for you to take embrace cryptography and to use it constructively.

Reference

A field guide to crypto, by Brett Thomas
http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2007/03/16/A_field_guide_to_crypto/1
Learning about cryptography
http://www.ciphersbyritter.com/LEARNING.HTM
An Introduction to the Use of Encryption
http://www.hermetic.ch/crypto/intro.htm