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Of all the secrets revealed by Edward Snowden the
most shocking and important one was that the US security agency NSA has
access to all our email ids, Facebook, Twitter and other social website
profiles. So our information oninternet is no more personal. NSA can
access any person in the world and can have a look at his private
information. They have made many terrorist attacks fail and caught many
smuggling and other criminal deals as they have access to the
information transferred on the internet. But the question is how NSA did
this? Our email ids and social website accounts are strongly encrypted
such that even the website itself doesn't have easy access to our
information.
Before explaining further I would like to explain the user that what
cryptography really is. Cryptography means to make a secret or
factitious code of your message or information, transport it on the
internet and then the receiver decrypts the code and the message is
printed as it really was.
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Fig: Encryption and Decryption Process. |
Cryptography has got some international standards, which are followed
all over the world. NSA’s cryptography experts had contributions in the
development of algorithms for the international cryptographic standard.
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Fig: NIST acknowledges NSA for their contribution in developing
cryptographic standard |
What NSA did was not that they left some fault in that algorithm rather
they left a back door in the algorithm according to which messages are
encrypted all over the world. National Security Agency has got the key
to that back door, so they can use that key anytime, open the door and
access all the information transferred over the internet lines. The key
can also be obtained by some calculations but even the fastest computers
we have got will take millions of years to perform that calculation.
The real culprit in this situation is actually NSA, because they wrote
the algorithm and deliberately put a backdoor in it. Accessing private
information of thousands of users is nothing but really a condemnable
action. The question is that what will be the future of internet
security after all this? |