Importance Of Cryptography And Its Accompanying Security Mechanisms

Confidentiality means keeping information given by or about an individual in the course of a professional relationship secure and safe from others. There are eight principals of good practice and anyone processing personal information must comply with them.

In the early days of computing, a hacker was primarily referred to as a computer guru, someone who is extremely technical with a high expertise in computer also known as “Expert Programmers”. Nevertheless, as technology is advancing at a face pace, hacking has adopted a completely different definition. The modern definition is someone who access a computer system primarily to steal or destroy information. Hacking has caused major harm in the realm of technology. Over the years, hackers have become much more lethal in their craft. They manage to break into complex information systems from entities such as banks, government agencies, and private businesses. Furthermore, they often manipulate their victims through social engineering in order to obtain financial benefits. Hackers hold different label such as: black hat hacker and white hat hacker in which all have their own motives.

* Confidentiality – the steps that are taken when people’s information is not kept confidential and on a need to know basis

The word hacking, usually associated with information technology, is a term used for the development of creative solutions for a problem by someone in a non-professional environment. With the introduction of personal computers and the internet, anyone could create solutions to problems in computer science. This led to the emergence of “hacker culture”, leading to the decentralization of computer industry (Hicks, 2014).

Confidentiality means not sharing information about people without their knowledge and agreement, and ensuring that written and electronic information cannot be accessed or read by other people who have no reason to see it.

When a fellow general received the message, he would wrap the paper around his corresponding scytale to decipher the message (Tyson 2014). Since the advent of computers though, encryption has become increasing important and relies almost solely on cryptographic means to secure information. When speaking about encryption today, it refers more to the process rather than the mathematical formulas used to scramble data. The basic idea behind encrypting a computer message is such that it is scrambled with a sequence of random bits, known as a key, and only parties with the corresponding key can transpose it back into a comprehensible format. These keys are created via a cipher, otherwise known as an algorithm. When a user sends a message, known as the plaintext, across a network, the computer applies an algorithm to the information to encode it, resulting in a ciphertext (Encryption Basics 2014). This method can be best summarized visually:

2. Confidentiality: Privacy or secrecy, limited to the people authorized to use the documents or information. Example, the therapists must

Confidentiality: Is not sharing verbal/ written information without permission, also not discussing one individual with another.

For starters, Graham explains that the word "hacker" has more than one definition. Although many might think of a hacker as a malicious malcontent who

Multi-factor authentication is the combination of two or more independent credentials, what the user knows (password), what the users has (house keys) or

Computer hacking: Is the practice of modifying computer hardware and software to accomplish a goal outside of the creator’s original purpose. People who engage in computer hacking activities are often called hackers. Since the word “hack” has long been used to describe someone who is incompetent at his/her profession, some hackers claim this term is offensive and fails to give appropriate recognition to their skills. The majority of hackers are technology buffs. They are self-motivated and learning about computers is their true passion. ("What Is Computer Hacking?" WiseGEEK. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 July 2013).

Confidentiality means that data is concealed and can only be seen by the intended recipient.

As global security continues to grow exponentially in response to threats of cyber terrorism, the field of computer security continues to proliferate into many adjacent socioeconomic and technologically-based areas of society. Gartner Group, a leading market research in the enterprise IT industry, has stated that the worldwide market for security software will reach $21B in 2011, rising to $15.8B in 2015 (Karjalainen, Siponen, 2011). This rapid growth of computer security is also driving the development of entirely new patents in the areas of cryptography, enterprise security management strategies, and extensive support for more advanced programming features for securing enterprise networks (Albrechtsen, 2007). The pace of development in this market is accelerating as the sophistication and variety of threats continues to also exponentially escalate (Liang, Xue, 2010).

Cryptography is an indispensable tool of techniques for the secured communication between two parties in the presence of third party. A cryptographic algorithm is a mathematical function for encryption or decryption where encryption is the process of translating plain text/ data into a random and meaningless (cipher text) data and decryption is the process of converting cipher text back into plain text. In most of the cases, two functions are involved, one for encryption and the other for decryption. It is basically about constructing and analyzing protocols which prevents public from reading the private messages.

Deniable ring signature: The ring signature scheme which has the property of anonymity revocation is known as deniable ring signatures. This was first proposed by Susilo and Nu . In this ring signature scheme, the verifier can interact with the signer or entities to confirm that the signer or entity has signed the signature with zero knowledge interactive proof. In this signature scheme, any signer cannot shift blame to other entities. Denial ring authentication is a combination of ring signatures and deniable authentication. Digital signatures provides authentication of messages thus providing non-repudiation of messages. In most of the applications, non-repudiation is one of the desirable properties, but in some applications it may not be. Inspired by such requirements Naor introduced Deniable ring signature scheme in 2002. In such ring authentication scheme, the verifier can be convinced that a entity of an adhoc group of participants is authenticating a message m, by not disclosing the identity information of the signer entity. It is also not possible for the verifier to convince any third party entity that message m is authenticated. This has been found in a number of applications. The Deniable ring signature scheme has the following properties: