What Is an Encryption?

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to tell you, what is an Encryption? Now an encryption is basically an Algorithm that any type of data can be run through. That will present a new version of that data. That is what we call encrypted. Meaning that it's not easily readable. You have to have some sort of decryption Algorithm. In order to pull the date back out. I'm going to show you a very simple example. This is called a Cipher. It's been around since Roman times. Let's go to our computer. Now if you have Cipher. Now Cipher basically does a one to one mapping of a single character to a new character. Like if we would want to encrypt the letter A. We would use the letter X, instead. Anybody who is decrypting our text would know that when they encounter an X. It really means an A. And the same thing for a P. If they get a K, it really means the letter P. So if we want to do Mary Had A Little Lamb, here. The M would be a J. A would be an X. The R would become an L. And the Y would become a C. Now our space character over here. Would become a Percent Sign. The letter H would become U. A is an X, D is an H, Percent sign. Seem kind of C, as I continue on here. That this text is becoming basically unreadable. Unless you know the key. Which is our Cipher down here. Unless you know that key to actually decrypt the text. That I'm sending through it. You have no way of figuring it out. The only way that you could figure out this type of thing. Is to do sort of a Brute Force type of thing. Where you go through each letter. And you continually run it through and run through. And run it through. Until you kind of figure out something that's actually readable. So I'm just about done here as I get to my B. Mary Had A Little Lamb, being run through our Cipher here. Which is called the Key. Gives me these results right here. Now I can send that to somebody. And they have to have our key letters. In order to decrypt this back into Mary Had A Little Lamb. There's a lot more advanced systems than that. But this a very simple one. My name is Dave Andrews. And I've just told you, what is an encryption."