The Dangers Of Cryptography And Encryption

The famous American architect and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller once said “Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.” ( The words of R. Buckminster Fuller are more relevant now than ever before; especially with the invention and use of dangerous technology such as encryption. Encryption works by using complex mathematical algorithms to scramble the contents of a file or message to another form, called ciphertext, which renders it unreadable to outside parties. Various encryption algorithms, many of which are unbreakable, are available for free public use around the world. Unimpeded public access to technology such as encryption gives unethical people the opportunity to abuse its power and commit crimes with …show more content…
The word cryptography can be split into pieces in order to better understand the word. The first part of the word cryptography, Crypto-, means “concealed, secret, hidden.” Graphy-, derived from the Greek word graphikos, means “of or for writing, belonging to drawing, picturesque.” (Online Etymology Dictionary) Put together, the word cryptography means “the process of writing or reading secret messages or codes” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary, ). In contrast, encryption simply means to perform any act or form of cryptography. Encryption is performed by scrambling the contents of a file or message through the use of complex mathematical algorithms. By doing this, the contents of the file or message become unreadable and will only become readable again when a user inputs a specific key or password. The algorithmic methods used to encrypt file contents and messages are very robust; meaning the average computer or even a supercomputer does not have the ability to crack it if the key or password is long enough. An article written on EETimes by Mohit Arora, a Security Architect, states that “even with a supercomputer, it would take 1 billion billion years to crack the 128-bit AES key using brute force attack. This is more than the age of the universe (13.75 billion years).” This statistic reveals a frightening truth: nobody, …show more content…
There are various applications one can download onto their smartphones that allow the user to encrypt all outgoing and incoming messages. By doing this, drug dealers are able to conduct business with little risk of being caught or stopped by law enforcement. An article written on BrisbaneTimes by Kristian Silva talks about a mobile application called Wickr, stating that “Wickr messages are encrypted and can be erased by the sender once they have been read. The messages are also wiped from Wickr 's servers, leaving few clues for evidence.” Once again, encryption being publicly available allows for criminals to commit crimes with little or no chance of law enforcement preventing