What can I do to protect my sensitive data? I am told I should use some kind of encryption. This sounds terribly technical. Must I have a PhD in computer science to do this? What is PGP? It sounds intimidating.
Name supplied
Happy Valley
The subject of security and encryption came up two years ago in Tech Talk and I am surprised it has not come up again sooner. Undoubtedly, security is important, and encryption is one aspect of it. There are many ways of doing this, but my favourite is the technology PGP, or pretty good privacy.
There are two issues with encryption; you can encrypt your own data so nobody else can read it, and you can encrypt a file or message in such a way to exchange it with somebody else. The mathematics involved in encrypting a message need not concern us too much here because the computer is really good at doing that.
We need what is called a key to encrypt something, but the problem since the beginning of writing is how do I pass the key to the person I want to communicate with? Sending the key is unsafe, and if I could give the person the key, well, then I would not need to encrypt the message, would I?
About 30 years ago, a terrific system was conceived by a couple of American mathematicians called Public Key Encryption. Through the wonders of mathematics, they worked out that it would be possible for an individual to have two keys, a public one that everybody in the world knew and a private one that nobody knew.