Find out how this tactic of shuffling information works so that it cannot be read by others
What does it mean to say that the cryptocurrencies are encrypted or iFood protects card data of your customers using encryption? Nothing more than this: in both cases, the composition of this information is changed so that it becomes unreadable to anyone who does not have authorization to access it.
Encryption serves to protect the data privacy that we send, receive and store on our devices, such as computers and cell phones. It can be used, for example, in the texts of the messages we exchange, in the files we create and when making an online banking transaction.
Yes, we are speaking Greek: the word was born from the combination of kriptós (“hidden”) and grápho (“writing”). In plain English, this hidden writing means the process of transforming data into a code that can only be deciphered by whoever has the key.
It works like this: first an algorithm uses complex mathematical equations to scramble the data and transform a normal text (or original, as experts say) into a cipher text (or code text); then offers a key to decipher it.
This action seeks to preserve the privacy of the data: when encrypted, it can only be read by those who have this key. Other people can view the information, but without the key they are unable to read what is written, only to see a meaningless sequence of characters and symbols.
Symmetric and asymmetric encryption
Encryption algorithms use two types of keys. The first is symmetric, that is, the one that can be used to both encrypt and decipher the message — the person who will send the data and the person who will receive it must have the same data.
The second is asymmetric, when there are two keys, one public (available to anyone) and the other secret. In this case, the data encrypted with the public key can only be deciphered by the person who has the secret key.
The more we digitize our lives, the more important it is to rely on encryption to protect the enormous amount of sensitive data we send and keep in our files. It is a security measure against cyberattacks, used by both governments and citizens to protect the information we exchange online.
Read more:
- What is blockchain and how does this network work
How iFood protects your card data
- Payment methods iFood: find out what they are and how they are protected
- Most Brazilians would accept using a digital currency
