Why Encryption Is Vital To Safe Home Working
The internet is full of all sorts of advertisements about using encryption for your web browsing and security on your email, but you’d be hard pressed to find someone who can explain just how important it is to secure your computer’s data from outsiders. The internet was created to make communication fast and easy, not to make it difficult or expensive for the average person to use it. Encryption is a built-in security feature built into every computer that we use everyday. It’s there for our own personal protection, and for the protection of our sensitive personal and financial information. Without it, we’d be taking a big risk with our financial stability and the potential for identity theft in the internet world.
Encryption is a key component of secure internet communication. When we talk about email (which, by the way is actually a form of encryption), the main purpose of email is secure transmission of sensitive information over the internet. This is very similar to how a secure fax works. A fax sender signs their fax message, and then puts a locking screen on it before it’s sent. The sender can then send a fax message that is readable only to the intended recipient – but can’t be read on the recipient’s machine. This is encryption.
Emails are similar. You create an email account (often with your email provider), set up your passwords and generally make sure that all of your activity is secure. Your password is needed so that the person you’re asking to open up your email doesn’t open the wrong one, or copy and paste it from somewhere on your computer. In some cases (such as when you use free email services) the password might also be delivered as a hyperlink on your computer, but this is still better than simply typing it in directly. Even if you have a good password, if it’s easy for anybody but yourself to crack, your email is not safe.
Emails are also useful because they are usually short messages. Long messages take too long to transmit over the airwaves. Short communications are much faster. A fax message, for instance, can be as short as eight words. However, a fax can be read by anyone who receives it, and people are constantly on the lookout for new ways to break email communication.
Emails are also useful because they’re cheap to get. You can download an email program for less than ten dollars. And if you do use one, it usually offers a way to encrypt all of your email communications. That’s good news for you, because then it’s easy to keep all of your information private without worrying about being spied upon. (As well as making it easier to delete old emails if necessary.)
But how does all of this work? Well, there are two parts to it, really. There is the encryption process, which makes it so that nobody besides you can read your email. Then, there is the scrambling of the email so that no one else can make sense of it. (This also makes it so that if you forget your password, you won’t be able to get into your account.)
The encryption key is the key that allows you to encrypt your email messages, and the scrambling device is what makes the scrambled information readable. Basically, there is a device which turns your plaintext email into an encrypted string of characters. Once that string of characters is encrypted, it’s possible to read the messages. However, both processes take time, and that’s where the need for password protection comes in.
Without password protection, an unscrambled message is just a series of random letters and numbers. That’s not very secure, since most criminals don’t go through that much trouble to figure out a password. With a password, you can ensure that only you and the people you trust have the ability to read the messages you send and receive. And that’s the strongest way to keep your identity safe while you are working online.