Encryption is a process in which information is converted into a form which cannot be understood by unauthorized user. Encrypted data cannot be read or understood by anyone except those possessing special key which works like password.
The result of the encryption process i.e. encrypted information is referred to as cipher-text in cryptography. Generally encryption is used to make confidential or personal data safe and secure from other persons.
Consider a person XYZ who keeps on forgetting his email account password. Now XYZ decides to store his password in a password.txt file on his computer so that whenever he forgets his password he can open password.txt and get his password. But problem arises now because he is not the only person who uses his computer. If some other user finds his password then that user will easily get access to XYZ’s account. To solve this problem person XYZ stores his password by replacing each alphabet and number of his password by it’s successive alphabet and number.
Original password: abc123
<---Encryption Process--->
Encrypted password: bcd234
<---Decryption Process--->
Original password: abc123
Now even if other user finds the file password.txt, they cannot access XYZ’s account because only XYZ knows the method of getting back the original password from the encrypted password. This was just a simple example, in fact various algorithms are used in industry to carry out encryption process.
The process of converting an encrypted data back to it’s original state is called decryption. Encryption is extensively used in computer science field and many software are available for encryption.
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