Denise Newell

Desci 4463

Weekly 7

Security in Distributed Computing:

Did You Lock the Door? Cryptography

This article defines cryptography as the principles, means, and methods for rendering information unintelligible, and for restoring the encrypted information back into intelligible form. Cryptography was used by Ancient Egyptians thousand of years ago and throughout the various wars. Encryption is considered to be the best for providing confidentiality for data storage and transmission.

Encryption has two purposes: to provide confidentiality for the storage and transmission of authentication or authorization components such as passwords, personal identification number, and any message authentication tokens. The second purpose is for confidentiality of network transmissions. I think all information should be encrypted in some form. What one persons thinks as being harmless information another may find as worth while information.

I do agree with the article that encryption does provide added safeguarding of information beyond that of the operating system and network controls. As technology improves on key management this technology will be an asset to computer security.

I work in the Healthcare field in a Medical Records department and with some facilities having computerized patient records; some type of encryption would only be logical to use.