Hello again! Did I trick you with the title? I know, Let me get straight to the point. You already know about and but when I kept those in terms of and it became a bit confusing. Isn’t it? I just wanted to talk about these techniques in terms of privacy and security. There is a high chance that you already know the things I’m about to explain. But, feel free to give it a read. I’m confident that you would know something useful by the end of this blog. Okay, let’s get into the topic. Encoding, Encryption, Hashing Identity, Integrity, Confidentiality You must be thinking of and are the fundamentals of Software Engineering and why am I over pitching these. But, there are assumptions that these three are similar and any one of them can be used to secure the information but it’s wrong. There is a lot of confusion around these terminologies. Encoding, Encryption, Hashing Without a proper understanding of these, A developer could ship insecure storage (or) transmission flows which are volatile to security and data breaches. Today, I will discuss the importance and applicable use cases of these three technologies. Most of us map these terminologies to a bunch of algorithms and forget the real use cases. From a security point of view, and are the keys to building software. Identity, Integrity, Confidentiality To know the origin (or) owner of the information. Identity/Authenticity Examples: Knowing the sender of a message Caller ID of an incoming call To protect the information from being altered/modified. Integrity Examples: Using SSL to avoid data alterations (DOS, MITM attacks) Server validation on incoming data ( Price validation of e-commerce checkout) Only the authorized have access to restricted information. Confidentiality Examples: Account access to a logged-in user Message access to the sender & receiverEncoding Encoding is a process of keeping a sequence of characters into a specific format for efficient transmission or storage. As encoding uses publicly available algorithms to format, it is not for securing the information. instead, it is used to optimize the size of data transmitted and to be consumed by a different type of system safely. is commonly used to encode binary data that needed to be stored or transferred in media which can process textual data. e.g. base64 As the information is encoded with publicly available schema all it takes to decode is the algorithm used to encode it. Encoding Encoding is a process of keeping a sequence of characters into a specific format for efficient transmission or storage. As encoding uses publicly available algorithms to format, it is not for securing the information. instead, it is used to optimize the size of data transmitted and to be consumed by a different type of system safely. is commonly used to encode binary data that needed to be stored or transferred in media which can process textual data. e.g. base64 As the information is encoded with publicly available schema all it takes to decode is the algorithm used to encode it. Examples: Base64, Unicode(UTF-8,UTF-16), ASCII, URL Encoding Use Cases: We use an encoding/decoding technique to communicate with computers. Any form of data we store/transform on(through) computer is encoded. Analog to digital: Hashing Hashing is a one-way street; data that has been hashed cannot be unhashed. Hashing ensures the of data. Meaning, alteration of data would be identified as each input produces the same output always. A hash is usually a hexadecimal string of several characters. integrity There are hashing algorithms that are compromised which is known as hash collisions. It literally means two inputs generating the same hash. MD5(Message Digest algorithm) is one such algorithm that has been phased out from being secure. : SHA-1, SHA-2, MD5, SHA-256 etc. Examples Use Cases: : Helps to avoid storing plain passwords. Only the user who knows the password will be able to retrieve the information. To securely store passwords Running hashing on an entire file will always generate the same hash. This is particularly useful for the distribution of software. It helps to verify the of a file while downloading to check if the file has been altered or damaged during transmission. To Identify files: checksum Encryption Encryption guarantees . Meaning, Information can be accessed only by those who are authorized to do so. Encryption requires a secret key to access the information. confidentiality There are two categories in Encryption. : Using the same key for encryption and decryptionSymmetric encryption Symmetric Examples: Payment applications to protect PII(Personal Identifying Information) during transactions. Storing text messages (or) sensitive information on a disk. : Using private & public keys. Encrypt with public and decrypt with private. Asymmetric Examples: HTTPS message encryption (Whatsapp, Signal) End-to-end Symmetric encryption is faster compared to Asymmetric. Feel free to go through this for detailed information. blog Use Cases: Contractual obligations, privacy laws, and data breaches are the reasons why we needed encryption on databases. Many organizations use a mixture of encryption, tokenization, and data masking to protect from potential threats. Databases: Encryption has been the main data security control for cloud computing. Encrypting storage volumes associated with applications, encrypting data in object storage. Cloud Storage: Conclusion: I hope you got a bit of clarity on the terminology and use cases. It is important to keep these in mind while designing any software. TL;DR: is used for efficient data storage and transmission Encoding is used to maintain the privacy Hashing is used to secure data with a key Encryption = ffee + veloper code co de
