Crunch These Numbers!

A 128-bit number has a possible 2¹²⁸ or 3,402,823,669,209,384,634,633,746,074,299,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different combinations!

The incredible growth of the Internet has excited businesses and consumers alike with its promise of changing the way we live and work. But a major concern has been just how secure the Internet is, especially when you're sending sensitive information through it.

Let's face it, there's a whole lot of information that we don't want other people to see, such as:

Credit-card information
Social Security numbers
Private correspondence
Personal details
Sensitive company information
Bank-account information

But the most popular forms of security all rely on encryption, the process of encoding information in such a way that only the person (or computer) with the key can decode it.

SSL - Secure Sockets Layer. A protocol from Netscape Communications Corporation, which is designed to provide secure communications on the Internet.

Computer encryption is based on the science of cryptography, which has been used throughout history. Before the digital age, the biggest users of cryptography were governments, particularly for military purposes. The existence of coded messages has been verified as far back as the Roman Empire. But most forms of cryptography in use these days rely on computers, simply because a human-based code is too easy for a computer to crack.

Most computer encryption systems belong in one of two categories:

Symmetric-key encryption
Public-key encryption

Public-key encryption takes a lot of computing, so most systems use a combination of public-key and symmetry. When two computers initiate a secure session, one computer creates a symmetric key and sends it to the other computer using public-key encryption. The two computers can then communicate using symmetric-key encryption. Once the session is finished, each computer discards the symmetric key used for that session. Any additional sessions require that a new symmetric key be created, and the process is repeated.

Public keys generally use complex algorithms and very large hash values for encrypting, including 40-bit or even 128-bit numbers. A 128-bit number has a possible 2¹²⁸ or 3,402,823,669,209,384,634,633,746,074,299,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different combinations!

This would be like trying to find one particular grain of sand in the Sahara Desert.

Are You Authentic?

As stated earlier, encryption is the process of taking all of the data that one computer is sending to another and encoding it into a form that only the other computer will be able to decode. Another process, authentication, is used to verify that the information comes from a trusted source. Basically, if information is "authentic," you know who created it and you know that it has not been altered in any way since that person created it. These two processes, encryption and authentication, work hand-in-hand to create a secure environment.

There are several ways to authenticate a person or information on a computer:

Password - The use of a user name and password provides the most common form of authentication. You enter your name and password when prompted by the computer. It checks the pair against a secure file to confirm. If either the name or the password does not match, then you are not allowed further access.
Pass cards - These cards can range from a simple card with a magnetic strip, similar to a credit card, to sophisticated smart cards that have an embedded computer chip.
Digital signatures - A digital signature is basically a way to ensure that an electronic document (e-mail, spreadsheet, text file) is authentic. The Digital Signature Standard (DSS) is based on a type of public-key encryption method that uses the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA). DSS is the format for digital signatures that has been endorsed by the U.S. government. The DSA algorithm consists of a private key, known only by the originator of the document (the signer), and a public key. The public key has four parts. If anything at all is changed in the document after the digital signature is attached to it, it changes the value that the digital signature compares to, rendering the signature invalid.

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