Introduction
In the digital world of internet in our days the information is more important than ever. For personal conversations, bussiness data, protecting sensitive information form unauthorized access is a big challenge. Cryptography is the key for security protection providing all the tools and techniques that are needed to secure communication and maintain privacy. As the technology evolving is very important and it has become essential for anyone who interacts with digital world.
RSA
RSA is an algorithm in modern cryptography and is being used to secure data transmission. This algorithm developed in 1977, it was in the concept asymmetric encryption, which is actually a pair of keys. As you understand the two keys are the private and the public key and we use them to encrypt and decrypt the data. The public key is the one that we share and is used to encrypt messages while the private key is secret and is used for decryption. The mechanism enables us to secure the communication and it allows us to have backbone protocols like HTTPS, secure email, digital signatures.
All the knowledge is based on mathematical difficulty of large prime numbers. Specifically RSA creates two large prime numbers, it multiplies them together and uses the result with some other values to form the encryption and decryption keys. While it’s easy to multiply large primes, reversing the process (factoring) is computationally infeasible with current technology—especially when key sizes are 2048 bits or more. This makes the RSA secure but is being supplemented/replaced by more powerful algorithms like Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC).
ChaCha20
ChaCha20 is a modern algorithm that is used to keep data save and private. Is not like the old methods that were working with fixed blogs, this one is a stream cipher, which means it scrambles data one piece at the time. This technique is very fast on smart devices and it does not need any expensive hardware to work effectively. Is being trusted by big companies like google and is working on applications like what’s up and signal for a secure communication. One good thing about chacha20 is that is very simple. It uses a private key, a number counter and a unique ID to create random data (a stream). And after that the stream is combined with the data that we want to send and it scramble it. The algorithm is working with Poly1305 for extra protection, so in the end it doesn’t only hide your message it also makes sure it hasn’t been tampered with.
AES
AES as known as Advanced Encryption Standard, is a very trusted and widely used encryption method today. It’s a symmetric algorithm, that means that the key that is generated is being used for encryption and decryption. AES works by dividing information into some fixed sized blocks and scrambling them by the use of mathematical steps. It can work with different key sizes 128,192,256. You are going to see AES everywhere for file encryption tools like password managers, VPNS, and even messaging applications. It is being used by government and military apps. AES has been tested several times and there is no way to find a way to break it yet., for many cybersecurity professionals it is called the gold standard of encryption.
I know that is sounds weird that this algorithm is using the same key to encrypt and decrypt but the secure of the situation is that the algorithm is using large key sizes like 128 bits long or more. So if you thing there are trillions of combinations so it’s impossible for an attacker to break it by a brute force attack or a super computer. It will take years to do it! And also AES performs multiple rounds of scrambling (substitution, permutation, etc.) to make the output look completely random. This makes it hard to reverse without knowing the key.
ECC
Asymmetric encryption that offers a strong security with small keys compare to other algorithms like RSA is the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). The ECC is based mathematics of elliptic curves over finite fields compared to the RSA that was relying on large prime numbers. It uses less computing power, bandwidth and energy which makes it possible and easier to use on smart devices. It is being used by messaging apps, cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and many internet protocols to keep all the conversations private and secure.