Encryption for business Encryption for business Cryptography is still classed as a military application but it has become essential to businesses as a method of ensuring secrecy. Despite being viewed as a military technology by many governments, cryptography is rapidly becoming one of the most important enablers of electronic commerce. Even if a company does not want to sell goods across the Internet, cryptography has a vital role to play in protecting commercially sensitive data from unauthorised access. What follows explains the basics of cryptography and summarises the issues facing any organisation that holds customer or corporate data in electronic form.
People encrypt data for two reasons.
One is to keep it secret, so that anyone who intercepts the data cannot read it or make use of it. Another is to authenticate both the integrity of the data and the identity of its source. Traditionally, these functions were provided using a secret key that was known only to the two correspondents involved. The other key is public, and the user distributes it as widely as possible, usually after getting it digitally signed by a trustworthy third party who can attest that the key belongs to that user. Data encoded by the private key can only be decoded by the public key, and vice versa.