Hai Pham - Week 7 - RSA Data Encryption for Financial Institution.


Data encryption is just a process of scrambling the data so it is not readable by unintended people.  For a normal conversation, we don’t need to encrypt the data.  However, if banks, government or military groups don’t have any data encryption apply for their daily business, they would be in a very bad shape.

Having said that, this week, I am talking about the second common encryption that is used widely by financial institution, which is RSA which was made of the name of three people that invented this algorithm.  They are Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman.

RSA is one of the most popular data encryption methods that is use for encrypting data over the internet.  With RSA, the encryption key is public and the decryption key is kept secret.  The encryption is based on the factoring of the two large prime numbers which makes it very hard for bad guys to decode it.  Again, it “only” can be decoded when a person has both public and private key.

The idea of RSA is: the public key can be sent to regular route, no need to be secret route (bad guys still can still the public key and encrypted message) but the private key will not be sent out, this would make RSA very strong encryption because without private key, it is extremely hard for anyone to decode it without a private key.

Reference:
StorageCraft Technology Corporation. (2017).  Retrieved from https://www.storagecraft.com/blog/5-common-encryption-algorithms/