Cryptography & Encryption: a secret language.

The internet came to change our lives, no doubt about it. We communicate more and more frequently thanks to it, in fact more than 60 billion (a thousand million) messages are sent through internet apps each day (source).  Adding that to emails and other forms of communication, thats an astounding amount of data flowing through the internet's tubes. And that data may contain any sort of information, important dates, pictures, banking information, addresses, sensible stuff really. So how can we get that data protected? because when its out there, it is out there. Thats why we have encryption, a way to cypher our data so only we can access it. Image translating all your messages into a secret language that only you and the person receiving the message can understand. Thats what encryption is. John Oliver of HBO's Last Week Tonight made a very funny video explaining encryption in layman terms (adult language warning). Computers have settings to encrypt your disk, and manny apps like Telegram and Whatsapp encrypt messages automatically. 

To understand how encryption works I did a small Caesar Cipher code in python, check it out. But Caesar Cipher only shifts letters around by n number of places, so its not very secure, to prove it I coded a message with my python script to try to challenge you, the reader, to try to decoded: 

The coded message is: qzodkbfuaz ue hqdk uybadfmzf fa wqqb kagd uzradymfuaz bdafqofqp rday efdmzsqde 

The spaces in the words can be a dead giveaway, leave a comment if you could figure it out. You can potentially use my script to try to crack the code. 

In real life the encrypting methods aren't so simple. Most common used method to encrypt our messages is by the Public & Private Key Cryptography method. The people at Computerphile made a quite detailed video explaining how it works.

Encryption and cryptography protects our data from any third party trying to use it for any sort of reason. When a third party, an attacker, is reading the messages that are being sent through a channel like the internet, thats called a Man in the middle attack. If messages are encrypted the attacker will only be able to read a bunch of random letters and symbols, thats why it has to be hard to decode. 

So try to figure out if your data is being protected by encryption.