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Go from Zero to Cypherpunk
We live in a post-Snowden world. For many, that means assuming none of your digital assets are safe from surveillance.
There are ways, however, to use the internet with insane mathematics in your favor to ensure that no one can see whatever it is that you’re sending to someone else.
Cryptography is an ancient mathematical science that was originally used for military communications, and designed to conceal the contents of a message should it fall into the hands of the enemy. Recent developments in cryptography have added additional uses, including mechanisms for authenticating users on a network, ensuring the integrity of transmitted information and preventing users from repudiating (i.e. rejecting ownership of) their transmitted messages.
Today, encryption is an integral part of many of the tools and protocols we rely on to protect the security of our everyday transactions and online communications. Encryption can be used on the physical layer of the Internet to scramble data that’s being transmitted via cable or radio communications. It adds support for secure communications to plaintext protocols like the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which enables Web browsing, and can protect the integrity of data exchanged through applications like email and mobile messengers. You can also encrypt data that is stored on devices like cellphones or computers, shielding the local copies of emails, text messages, documents, and photos from unauthorized snooping.
How and at what layer your data is encrypted makes a huge difference. Just because a product or service uses encryption doesn’t necessarily mean that everything that’s stored on or sent over that platform is completely private. For example, Google now makes the HTTPS protocol (HTTP over an encrypted connection) the default for all Gmail traffic, which prevents unauthorized users from reading emails while they travel between Google’s email servers and end users’ computers — but it does nothing to stop Google itself from accessing plaintext copies of those conversations. If you don’t want your email provider to be able to read your messages, you have to take additional steps to implement end-to-end encryption, which refers to a system in which “messages are encrypted in a way that allows only the unique recipient of a message to decrypt it, and not anyone in between.” With end-to-end encryption, you encrypt the contents of a message on your local machine or device. That data is then transmitted as ciphertext by the email provider to the intended recipient, who is the only person who can decrypt and read it.
Is all of law enforcement and US government against encryption?
Not necessarily. Law enforcement and intelligence officials have often said they appreciate the benefits of encryption when it comes to protecting data from threats such as hackers or foreign governments. They just want to be sure there’s a way to access encrypted data — especially communications — for their investigations.
First, how does encryption protect my data?
Encryption algorithms use math to “scramble” data so it can’t be read by an unauthorized person — such as a hacker or government seeking to break in.
Data can be encrypted in two places: First, it can be encrypted “in transit,” such as when you send information from your browser to a website. Second, data can be encrypted when it’s “at rest,” such as when it is stored on a computer or on a server.
Data that can be read and understood without any special measures is called plaintext or cleartext. The method of disguising plaintext in such a way as to hide its substance is called encryption. Encrypting plaintext results in unreadable gibberish called ciphertext. You use encryption to ensure that information is hidden from anyone for whom it is not intended, even those who can see the encrypted data. The process of reverting ciphertext to its original plaintext is called decryption.
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