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When using your internet on a daily bases, you often pass by all the important personal information that is at risk. You type in your financial details, name, passwords, account credentials, family information and location pretty often. But keep in mind that anything you forward through the internet can be intercepted by malicious individuals. Think about your browsing session as a big river. When you log in somewhere, you write your account details on a small paper boat, and send it down the water. Although it will eventually reach its destination, you never know whether someone got hold of it with a fishing net, and read your private info before forwarding the little paper boat.
Encryption played an important role in protecting secrets since the ancient times. Rulers and military commanders wrote down a gibberish-looking message, and only those with the specific instructions could translate it. In our example, the paper boat would only show some random letters and numbers instead of your name. The core principal of encryption didn’t change ever since; nowadays programs use the same strategy.
We could even say that the situation is even easier, since changing one line of characters into another doesn’t make much difference for a computer. Not to mention the vast processing power of the machines. Even an old laptop can decipher a code that would cause headache for a room full of scientists. It’s not a big surprise that encryption is the main selling point for VPNs. When we talk about the levels of encryption, 256-bit coding for instance, it means the pool of available characters that create the jumbled up message code. The more characters are included, the harder it is to crack it. There are two problems with the traditional encoding systems. First, stronger encryption needs a lot of CPU power and connection speed. Second, with the right hacking method, these codes can be forced open.
Luckily for you, smart heads and geniuses work day and night to come up with fool-proof encryption solutions. For example, a graduate student called Craig Gentry invented homomorphic encryption . This method is using cloud technology, and allows the personal data to be handled in a safe and protected environment, without the need to give away the access to anyone. Homomorphic encryption isn’t the only new idea. Functional encryption only gives out specific information for the key holder, and not all of the data, thus preventing hackers from getting anything more than a vague clue. In our recent interview with FrootVPN, the Swedish VPN provider touched on the subject of post-quantum key encryption, as the possible future solution for the industry. Still, our favorite is the so-called honey encryption, which senses where the system senses the wrong guesses, and provides misleading information as a feedback.
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