What is Encryption?
This lesson explains what encryption is and how it works.
Today, many people use the Internet for communication, sharing data, banking, shopping, and lots of other stuff. The problem with this level of use is the rapidly increasing threat of cybercrime, and other intrusions on your privacy. A hacker might be listening to our data while it is being transferred over the network. This is troublesome if we are sending sensitive data like passwords.
One of the best ways to protect the data transferred over the Internet is encryption.
Encryption is a way of converting plaintext into ciphertext (an encoded text that is not understandable by the third party). Encryption requires the use of an encryption key and an encryption algorithm. The key is used to encrypt/decrypt the plaintext into ciphertext. How that key is used to encrypt the plaintext is defined by the encryption algorithm. Both the receiver and the sender must have the encryption key.
