This article discusses the importance of encryption technology in the modern world, its limitations, and how irresponsible user behavior exacerbates the problem of privacy breaches.
We all have memories of playing in elementary school, closing the door behind us and saying, “Give me your secret password,” when someone came to the door. The person on the other side of the door would have to say the desired password to open the door. This may not seem like a big deal, but passwords are actually very important. A password is a piece of information that encodes the content of a communication so that it cannot be read by a third party. In other words, it’s a way to prevent access to information. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in cryptography because the modern world has become a world of information and creativity, which has led to an abundance of data, and cryptography is an indispensable technology for keeping this data safe.
Cryptography was, and still is, a very important technology in military terms, but as modern society has become an information society, it has also become a commercially important technology due to the rapid development of networks. Currently, despite various studies on cryptography, we do not know when our personal information will be leaked, and there are many incidents of personal information being leaked. In addition, there are many conflicts between countries due to the leakage of information, and people have doubts about the security of their governments. In this situation, the development of cryptographic technology becomes more topical and important. In this essay, I will discuss the problem of information leakage, which is closely related to cryptography, and the cryptographic technologies that are related to it.
First, let’s consider the causes of frequent data breaches in relation to cryptography. The biggest reason for data breaches is that cryptography is not perfect. At the current state of cryptography, in order to encrypt information, you need to generate a cryptographic key and store it well. If the key is not stored well and is exposed to someone else, that person can easily access the key and decrypt the encrypted information, increasing the likelihood of a data breach. Also, no matter how secure the encryption technology is, if users don’t change their passwords regularly or set passwords that are too easy, the likelihood of a data breach is much higher because the encrypted information is more accessible and easier to decrypt.
The second cause can be found in the contradiction of encryption. If you encrypt information with a cryptographic algorithm to protect it, someone who wants to hack it will try to crack that algorithm somehow. They’ll try to somehow gain access to the encryption key and decrypt it. The information is then more vulnerable to leakage than it would have been otherwise. The whole point of encryption is to protect information, but by encrypting it, you’re actually putting it at risk. Furthermore, there are so many different algorithms that it is possible that some of the information may be omitted in the process of implementing the encryption technology, and human error may increase the likelihood of information leakage.
Furthermore, if you encrypt with the most complex and secure algorithms that are impossible for humans to crack, you’re locking the information away from anyone. In this case, it will be unavailable even when you need to recover it. Cryptography was developed to protect valuable information, not to simply lock it away and bury it, which would defeat the purpose of cryptography. In the end, there is an inevitable ambivalence in research related to the development of cryptography.
As we’ve seen, the problem with cryptography in protecting information is that there can be loopholes in the accessibility of encryption keys and that encryption can actually compromise information. However, cryptography isn’t the only problem with data breaches. Many companies require semi-coercive consent to provide information and ask for detailed information. In addition, the users who provide information have not changed their attitude of taking information too easily and are only concerned about security issues such as encryption technology, hoping that encryption technology will improve quickly and completely protect their information.
Users need to stop taking their information so lightly, and stop assuming that cryptography will solve everything. Based on these points, cryptography will need to evolve into a technology that is easily implemented and requires more delicate and sophisticated methods to recover information, and it will need to evolve into a way to completely protect information that cannot be leaked due to human error.
