Types of Encryption Software

Introduction:

Data security nowadays is a significant cause of concern for both private individuals and businesses, as the most commonly stolen item in the cyber world is data. For a private individual, the impact of data-stealing is mostly personal, but for a business, data-stealing results in the compromise of essential company data, which may end up impacting the business processes and its overall reputation. To prevent this, various encryption algorithms are available to keep the unauthorized third party away from essential user data. Each of them has its own set of improvements over one another and is usually an improvement over an already existing older algorithm

Types of encryption algorithms:

Depending on the type of data, organization, functionality and other factors, different types of encryption algorithms are available. While some may be free in public domain and commonly used, others might not be so much readily available. Some of them are discussed below.

1. AES: Advanced Encryption Software or AES is an encryption algorithm which is used in the field of advanced computing. AES is generally available in 128-bit software, but its variations can be available in 192 and 256-bit software, used for heavy-duty encryptions. AES is usually tough to break into, and is resistant to most type of external system attacks, with the only exception being a brute force, where the attacker has to go through all possible combinations of the cipher. Due to this, it is preferred by most government and private agencies globally (Babitha & Babu,2016).
2. Triple DES: Triple Data Encryption Standard or Triple DES was developed to be an improvement over DES, which was an earlier used algorithm. Due to its extensive usage, DES algorithm had become a ubiquitous algorithm and could be easily broken into, as encryption were simple enough. 3DES uses three individual keys with 56bit length. Each of the keys carries their own set of encryption and is therefore difficult to hack. Hence, as compared to its earlier version, 3DES offer more security (Mushtaq et al. .2017).
3. Blowfish: Blowfish was also developed to replace the already existing DES encryption. Unlike DES, blowfish is a symmetric cipher which splits the data block into two equal blocks of 64 bit and then encrypts them separately. Unlike other algorithms which generally take up a certain amount of time, blowfish is relatively faster and is very much efficient. Since blowfish is available for free in the public domain, it is widely used by many private companies and individuals. Blowfish has a significant application in e-commerce and payment gateway websites, which use the algorithm to safeguard passwords and essential user data (Ross, & Josephraj,2017).

Conclusion:

With the increase in hacking attempts over companies and individuals over the years, it is very much essential to safeguard private data using the appropriate encryption algorithm. It can also be noted that every algorithm already existing, is some sort of improvement over a previous model, which was eventually modified and made further secure by developers. Each algorithm has a specific set of traits, which differs them from one another, while also making them useful in their respective fields of application.