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In the context of cryptography, encryption has a specific meaning. Your intuitive non-standard definition may be interesting and useful, but its aking to bringi
by 3np 5y ago
In the context of cryptography, encryption has a specific meaning. Your intuitive non-standard definition may be interesting and useful, but its aking to bringing up perceptive hashing like what Apple's been introducing for CPAM on iCloud. At this point it becomes an overloaded term and the meaning depends on context. Words are more useful and efficient if we have a common understanding to stand on.
> I don't really understand the confusion around these terms in terms of day-to-day actual work. Is this really a problem?
It absolutely is. I've seen software that, instead of salt-hashing passwords in the DB, will encrypt them with an global RSA public key (not only less secure and way less efficient, you now also have an effective undocumented max-length of passwords).
Or, way more common, utilizing base64-encoding as "encryption".
If understanding of the differences was more widespread, at least these systems may have been less terrible.
- bgro 5y agoI agree with everything you said. My point boils down to it seems like there is ambiguity between the technical definition vs the actual practice and security requirements we've currently decided on as acceptable. Somebody who uses base64 to "encrypt" into a database clearly did their job wrong. A test question that says something like "True/False, encryption can be used to alter the original string into a different string" is true because it doesn't go into the details about the security that we all (should) know needs to be there. When we ask the question kind of backwards from the ambiguous meaning like this, I think we can get a different definition and end up with silly things that technically meet the definition requirement such as base64. Anyway, my take doesn't really matter. It's more of venting how I always get stuck on easy questions in software dev interviews and end up losing out to somebody who uses base64 in prod to attempt implementing "encryption" to the database.