Unlocking Cryptography

Secure encryption is essential for transferring money electronically between banks or ordering products online with your credit card. Without it, e-commerce would grind to a halt. Understanding how modern cryptography works can give you an advantage as businesses and governments get more involved in this field.

In this learning module, you will learn:

how to encrypt a message using basic cryptographic methods

the difference between private key cryptography and public key cryptography and why the latter is better for big business

the detailed mathematics behind the RSA algorithm (named after three mathematicians who proposed it) and how it decrypts and encrypts messages

-- Deane Yang
Professor of Mathematics at Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Encrypt a Message
Cryptography has been around for thousands of years and has had an important role in many of history's decisive events. In this section you will learn:

how to encrypt a simple message

how to avoid common pitfalls in encryption that make the code easy to break

why we use encryption

Private Key vs. Public Key
Common linguistic sense would seem to dictate that something private would keep your information more secure than something public. Not so in the world of cryptography. In this section, you will learn:

why private key cryptography doesn't work well for big businesses

how public key cryptography was invented

how public key cryptography keeps information secure on the Internet (Flash animation)

how the RSA algorithm lets public key cryptography work

what the future of encryption looks like

The Mathematics of Public Key Cryptography
The RSA algorithm relies on the ease of doing modular arithmetic and the difficulty of factoring large numbers. So brush up on your modular arithmetic, watch your p's and q's, and see how the mathematics of public key cryptography actually works. In this section you will learn:

how to create a public key cryptography system

how a message is encrypted and decrypted by following an example

how to crack the RSA encryption system--at least in theory

what the best-known methods are for factoring large numbers

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  For additional information, comments or questions, please contact:
  Ryan Craig, VP Business Initiatives, ryan.craig@fathom.com 212-279-9494 ext 1002
  Laurie Naismith, Business Development, laurie.naismith@fathom.com 212-279-9494 ext 1074