The protection of data has become ever more important due to the privacy and secrecy involved for corporate designs. Financial institutions and defense contractors have had to increase the security of their data in order to protect the information from hackers. Information has become a very important and valuable commodity and attackers will try to use their skills in order to steal this information for their own uses and gains. In order to protect this data, corporations use encryption to convert their data into an unreadable format in order to thwart the attackers. Most corporations have now employed methods to encrypt all data being sent outside of their own networks while also employing encryption techniques on the hard drives of all user computers in order to protect any information that physically leaves the building. This keeps the information from being accessed by an attacker or even a thief that may steal a laptop from a vehicle from being able to access the data on a system and using it for their own purposes. Encryption and decryption work hand in hand together, you cannot have one without the other and still be able to read data. Current uses of encryption and decryption for electronic information systems are easily explained using online banking as the example. When a user decides to purchase a product online from a web retailer, their credit card information has to be confirmed with information on both the front and back of the physical card. This information is then confirmed by the retailer with the credit card company by sending encrypted information to them and then receiving confirmation back from them through this same encryption. This encryption protects the users from attackers that maybe listening for packet flow to the individual credit card companies from gaining information that is usable for private gain. Currently, most encryption is using a standard of 128 bit but as time progresses this will increase in order to further protect data from creative attackers.
Symmetric and Asymmetric Symmetric cryptology is an encryption technique in which the sender and receiver use the same encryption security key to send and access data. This key allows the sender to encrypt the data before sending it across a network and then this key allows the receiver to decrypt the data in order