Encryption made simple

Encryption is a word you may have heard used in the computer world, but what you may not know is that as scary as it is, it really isn’t too complex. Actually way back in early Rome, Caesar used a simple method of encrypting messages he passed along to his soldiers and those who needed top secret information. What he did was used a style of encryption that’s now referred to as a Caesar Shift Cipher which in essence sounds really complex but is relatively simple.

In a caesarian cipher, the encryption is basically just a substitution that looks like this

Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz being the regular alphabet

Defghujklmnopqrstuvwxyzabc with the cipher using a shift of three

Basically what that means is that if you wanted to write something out you would use the 3rd letter over from where it would be in the regular alphabet

For example:

P svol fvn is the encrypted text

I love you is the decrypted text using a shift of eight instead of three

That being said, this method is very useful for manually encrypting passwords, network keys, or even just sending cute messages to your significant other given they’re as nerdly as you.
In modern encryption there are probably about a million different things you can use to encrypt anything and everything from files to messages.

This brings me to my next point of discussion; password security. Your password is not and will not ever be entirely safe. That being said, there are a number of ways to help beef up your security. Passwords can be encrypted using the method above, thus making your security greater, but what’s the use of all that if your password recovery question is something like

“What high school did you graduate from?” That kind of information is easily obtainable from any social networking site such as Facebook or even just Google if you’re a higher profile target.

Actually there is even a website that can randomly generate passwords for you here https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm

On top of that, you can even encrypt your files using a program called truecrypt which can be found at http://www.truecrypt.org/