Secret services: (Internet security and personal information).With increasing amounts of sensitive information passing through the Internet, security becomes an important issue. People buying products or services need assurance that their credit-card details will not be intercepted. Companies and governments need to be secure from high-tech espionage espionage (ĕs`pēənäzh'), the act of obtaining information clandestinely. The term applies particularly to the act of collecting military, industrial, and political data about one nation for the benefit of another. . The use of an early computer to crack the German secret codes during WW2 sounded the death knell death knell Noun something that heralds death or destruction Noun 1. death knell - an omen of death or destruction for traditional methods of cryptography which depended on substituting different characters or words for others. In 1975 Whitfield Diffie Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie (born June 5 1944) is a US cryptographer and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965. and Martin Hellman Martin Edward Hellman (born October 2, 1945) is a cryptologist, famous for his invention of public key cryptography in cooperation with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle. Hellman graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. invented an encryption The reversible transformation of data from the original (the plaintext) to a difficult-to-interpret format (the ciphertext) as a mechanism for protecting its confidentiality, integrity and sometimes its authenticity. Encryption uses an encryption algorithm and one or more encryption keys. system that used two related `keys'--a `public' one which could be sent to anyone who wanted to send something to you, and a `private' one which was not distributed, and was used to decode (1) To convert coded data back into its original form. Contrast with encode. (2) Same as decrypt. See cryptography. (cryptography) decode - To apply decryption. the information sent through your public key. This was still not totally secure as the public key could be used to crack the private key by going through all the possible combinations (in the same way that a safe is cracked). `Strong encryption', which is harder to crack, uses large keys, with a correspondingly large numbers of possible combinations. (DES, a commonly used strong system, has 10 to the power 17 possible combinations. In January 1999, a group of computer enthusiasts cracked a DES key in 22 hours.) As computers get more powerful, it becomes easier to crack previously secure systems. Because criminals have also embraced the use of encryption to organize themselves over the Internet, governments have been concerned about public access to this technology. For several years the US government banned the sale of strong encryption An encryption method that uses a very large number as its cryptographic key. The larger the key, the longer it takes to unlawfully break the code. Today, 256 bits is considered strong encryption. As computers become faster, the length of the key must be increased. software. But it could easily be bought and downloaded from websites in other countries. Britain has taken a different tack: The Regulation of Investigatory Powers act (1999) gives the government powers to force anyone using encryption to hand over their keys or face a two-year prison sentence--legislation that caused an outcry among civil liberties campaigners. |
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