Negative Effects Of Cryptography

Everyone has secrets they want to protect. Whether it is on computers, on paper, or verbal, secret communication has been around since humans could first communicate. Cryptography is the way we can transmit secret messages so that only the person it is meant for can understand it. The art of coding and decoding messages has progressed immensely through time, and has become increasingly difficult to break with the use of technology. Cryptography’s evolution has transformed the computing world into what it is today, and this comes with positive and negative effects. As long as people have secrets and want to transmit them, cryptography will continue to evolve. Cryptography has developed rapidly and tenaciously in the world of computing technology, …show more content…
The integration of cryptography in computers has created an entire field of breaking and creating codes in society. Classic cryptography has escalated to a level where it is extremely difficult to decipher. This progression has contributed immensely to society and helped it in many ways, and has become increasingly vital to our well being. A few major examples of the impact of cryptography on society are the prevention of terrorist attacks, war prevention, encrypting financial information, and securing our country’s secrets from others. With increased ability to shelter secrets, there is also negative impact. Illegal activity can expand in this computer-reliant society due to indecipherable codes, more access to personal information through cracking passwords, and untraceable websites. Most of the Internet is the “dark net” because of things like cryptography, but without it the computing technology world would not be what it is …show more content…
Modern cryptography uses binary arithmetic because that is what computers use, and cannot be represented in the previous methods of encrypting. The different types of ciphers used in modern cryptography are made for computers, and that is why there is such vast use of them today. Stream ciphers and block ciphers are the two classes of algorithms (Gove 1). “Stream ciphers operate on essentially continuous streams of plain text represented as 1s and 0s, while Block ciphers operate on blocks of plain text fixed size” and the most involved algorithm is a stream cipher because it “tends to be implemented more in hardware devices while block ciphers are more suited to implementation in software to execute on a general purpose computer” (Gove 1). Without these ciphers, we could not operate how we do today. The Internet allows for exchange of information instantly, and this private information in our economy, military, government, and private sectors need to be securely transmitted. We are “more dependent on the Internet and automated information systems than any other country in the world, however, the very technology that created this independence is also its greatest weakness” (Gove 5). Unfortunately, these ciphers are not entirely reliable and secure. With growing usage of cryptography, the ciphers we use today, stream and block, are not completely safe from breaches. Codes are