Friday, November 29, 2013

Cryptography and Computer Security


Did you buy anything online recently? Use an ATM machine? If so, whether you know it or not, you used cryptography. Cryptography (in the guise of the SSL protocol) protects your credit card information as it whizzes across the Internet, and ensures that others can't withdraw money from your account.

Our computers help us stay connected to the modern world. We use them for banking and bill paying, shopping, connecting with our friends and family through email and social networking sites, surfing the internet, and so much more. We rely so heavily on our computers to provide these services that we sometimes overlook their security. Because our computers have such critical roles in our lives and we trust them with so much personal information, it’s important to improve their security so we can continue to rely on them and keep our information safe.

Attackers can infect your computer with malicious software, or malware, in many different ways. They can take advantage of unsafe user practices and flaws in your computer’s programs (flaws including vulnerabilities and unsecured services and features) and use social engineering (in which an attacker convinces someone to perform an action such as opening a malicious email attachment or following a malicious link). Once your computer is infected, intruders can use the malware to access your computer without your knowledge to perform unwanted actions. They can steal your personal information, change computer configurations, cause your computer to perform unreliably, and install even more malware they can use to leverage attacks or spread malware to others.

Cryptography refers to encryption, where the ordinary message is process based on some algorithm into unintelligible text called as cipher text. The main purpose of encryption here is to provide confidentiality, integrity, non-repudiation and authentication.

Following practice will make you to keep your computer secure
·         Connect to secure network
·         Enable and configure firewall
·         Install Antivirus
·         Remove unnecessary software
·         Operate under the least privilege
·         Apply software update

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4 comments:

  1. I like how you related the concept of cryptography to real-life situations. Yes, ATM machines and any banking and shopping online websites use this method of encryption to protect our credit card information. It is like having personal bodyguards to protect from any outside strangers. It is because of these outside strangers that we also need protection in our computers, since we put our personal information in it, so nothing bad will happen to us.

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  2. Hi Vimal, I like your post. First of all, it is good to know SSL protocol is used in transforming the credit card information. It is true that the heavier we rely on the internet, the more we should pay attention to the security problem on every transaction. Also it is scary that once our computer is infected, intruders can use the malware to access our computer without our knowledge to perform unwanted actions such as stealing our personal information and changing computer configurations. As a result, in my opinion, internet security should be a common knowledge everyone should have.

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  3. I am wondering if there is a connection between ssl and https. I am learning a lot of stuff as I red your post and other peoples posts. I think it as we rely more on the internet we should also know some of the places it can fail.

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  4. Hello, vimal Kumar. good to read your post. I agree with you that as you mentioned above, It's is very important to protect our computer. because in these days, we cannot live in or work on everything without computer. that means we saved everything in the computer. So, It's very important. additionally, in order to protect our own computer, it's also important to backup usually. even though we try to secure our computer, virus might invade our computer. overally, it's informative and good to read. Good work!

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