A review of some encryption methodologies and an introduction to a new methodology that may challenge the National Security Agency.

Encrypting information is not new; it's as old as the Roman Empire and even further back than that. Today the National Security Agency tries to decrypt information from our enemies and even in some cases our allies. There are numerous schemas for encryption. The oldest was just the substitution matrix. One letter was substituted for another. The most popular schema today for commercial encryption is private key public key encryption using the RSA Algorithm. Another popular methodology is using the elliptic curve cryptography.

Before we discuss a new methodology of cryptography to seriously challenge the NSA, let's

talk about Elliptic Cryptography and RSA.

Elliptic Key and RSA:

Elliptic key encryption utilizes the algebra of elliptic curves as an encryption methodology. Its keys can be shorter and is considered more efficient than RSA using less CPU time to decrypt.

RSA is the most widely used methodology for commercial transactions (I almost exclusively use RSA as opposed to all other encryption methodologies). It was invented by the mathematicians Rivest, Shamir and Adleman and is the oldest public/private key methodology.

Both of these encryption methodologies involve a public key and a private key. What that means is that there’s a private key that you use that you keep a secret. And a public key that you’ve distributed among users who need to decrypt the information. Let me give you an example of usage of public and private keys.

A company wants to put up a website and they want that website to be....

Read the rest of this story with a free account.