Today's businesses have access to a wealth of free data, ranging from financial data to customer demographics, the majority of which they want to keep private. Data encryption safeguards your privacy while allowing authorized users access. However, encryption is not guaranteed. Understanding data encryption and your options can help you reduce risk and safeguard your most valuable assets.

Data Encryption: A Brief Introduction

Data encryption is a method of safeguarding data confidentiality by transforming it into securely encrypted information known as cipher - text, all of which can be retrieved at the moment of encryption or with the assistance of a special decryption key formed ahead of time. is. Data encryption should be used when storing or transmission of data and is normally used in tandem with authentication and authorization to ensure that only authorized users offer or use the key.

Data Encryption: Understanding Its Importance

Since data is readily available and favorable to malicious users, there seems to be a growing need for protection. Furthermore, many enterprises are bound by privacy laws, many of which mandate the use of encrypted data. Data encryption ensures the integrity of your data, besides the benefits of security, enhanced privacy, and blocking unapproved access. Encryption is being used to safeguard your information from malicious modifications as well as to legitimize its source and authenticity.

Data Encryption: Different Types of Algorithms

Data encryption algorithms are in abundance to select from. These are usually based on the use case, but let's understand the most frequently used ones:

●       Triple DES: Here, the standard DES algorithm is performed three times. First, data is encrypted, then decrypted, and then finally again encrypted to ensure a secure and longer key length is formed. For an extra layer of safety, one, two, or three different keys can be leveraged. Because 3DES is a block cipher, it is vulnerable to block collision attacks.

●       RSA: Asymmetric one-way encryption was used by it, one of the first public-key algorithms. You may not know this but RSA is widely considered and used on the internet, more because of its long key length. Various browsers leverage it to secure the insecure networks. Furthermore, it's a part of various security protocols like SSL/TLS, SSH, OpenPGP, and S/MIME.

●       Twofish: It is considered to be a reliable and truly fast algorithm with complex key structures that provide additional security. It is available in sizes like 128, 196, and 256-bit. To add to its benefits, it is entirely free to leverage, and is even present in some top freemium software programs. A few examples include KeePass, VeraCrypt, and PeaZip.

●       Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC): It is an asymmetric method, in the SSL/TLS protocol, and is a better alternative to RSA. Here, the key length is significantly reduced, while the security and safety are equally increased

●       Advanced Encryption Standard (AES): AES is amongst the top encryption standards leveraged by businesses, and even the US government.  Being a block cipher, it leverages the symmetric key algorithm of data encryption, and is available in 128, 192, and 256-bit sizes. Here, as the size increases, the quantity of encryption rounds increases too. It is intended for straightforward hardware and software implementation.

●       Blowfish: Blowfish is the example of a symmetric cipher, wherein, the key length resides between 32 and 448 bits. The key length leveraged is the decision-maker for the performance of this algorithm. Blowfish is a block cipher, which means that when you encrypt data, you divide it into 64-bit fixed blocks.

●       Format Preserving Encryption (FPE): One-of-a-kind algorithm, it performs the process of anonymization for the content. Here, the data that gets encrypted retains its original format. To explain this, say, if a client ID has 10 digits, the encrypted form will also contain the same number and character type as the original one. However, it’ll leverage a contrasting character to safeguard the original data.

Data Encryption: Some of the Popular Benefits

After understanding data encryption and the different algorithm types, now we'll understand the underlying benefits that we can witness:

1. Empowers Integrity of Data: Having proper data encryption helps businesses to prevent any accidental or malicious alteration of sensitive data.
2. Goes hand-in-hand with compliance: Most regulations and industry standards explicitly demand data encryption. With the presence of robust encryption, it becomes easy to present to the auditors that the business is at par when it comes to protecting sensitive data.
3. Secures data in transit: With the process of data transfer between two or more systems, a big question mark is imposed on the confidentiality and integrity of data, causing risks, and a big one among them, man in the middle (MitM) attacks. This can be prevented if there exists encryption of data in transit, usually the implementation of TLS protocol (Transport Layer Security). It guards against most of the risks, data is exposed to.
4. Data in cloud storage is protected: Data stored in the cloud computing platform is vulnerable to a wider range of threats, including accidental online disclosure, connection by other cloud users, and security breaches at the cloud provider. Data encryption in cloud storage by default provides an additional layer of protection against these kinds of threats.
5. Remote work becomes highly secure: Many employees are storing data beyond the physical location as a result of the significant increase in remote working or working from home. Ensure that data is encrypted wherever it is stored in these scenarios to improve security.
6. Intellectual property is secure: Many organizations value intellectual property as a major asset valued at millions of dollars. By encrypting the information and firmly maintaining the encryption keys, a company can make it useless to an attacker.

Final Words

This concludes today's article on Fundamentals of Data Encryption. To summarize, we first discussed data encryption, then its importance, next the different algorithms, and finally the underlying benefits of encryption of data.

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