Exercise 1

Cipher is one of the best ways to secure a message but we all know that this is not all
about good intentions. Cipher can save you from dangerous situations but it can also put you in
danger. One example is if you’re a politician, it is expected that you’ll have many enemies
wanting to put you down so they could get the throne. Then, you suddenly caught one of the
enemy’s men hiding a letter and you’re suspecting that it has something to do with you. The
problem is, the letter is encrypted and you don’t have any idea how to decrypt the message.
Good thing, you have a staff that knows about ciphers and they were able to decrypt and read the
letter. That way, you can think of ways how to save your life from the execution plot by the
enemy. Encrypted messages can only be decrypted using a key. For example, you are in the
business industry and you are in a trade secret with your business partners. You are all expected
to stay quiet about what you talked about in a meeting but it is inevitable to talk about it (i.e e-
mail), so, you come up with the idea of using a shared key for the encrypting and decrypting of
your conversations since you’re all from IT industry. In that way, you were all be able to secure
your messages since there’s always a possibility that someone might hack into your e-mails. That
way, you won’t be able to know what you’ve talked about. Another way that you can use cipher
for your daily life is by encrypting a file that has important information inside it. So, the main
concept of cipher is all about security and safety.

Exercise 2

As a business analyst, security is the most important factor that I need to maintain in
every data the company holds. To integrate ciphers to secure the company from threats, I think
it’s best to use an asymmetric key like RSA (Rivest Shamir Adleman). In this type of cipher,
there are two keys involved in this - one that’s used for public and one that’s used for private. It
would confuse the person who’s trying to attack the company and steal information. Since
technology is continuously evolving, it would be challenging to secure data using the strongest
encryption. However, the IT industry is not something to be underestimated and that’s what I’m
aiming for. I think that you can only integrate all these types of cipher for the company’s security
if you keep pace with the evolving technology. For example, with the current technology, it is
said to be advisable to use data encryption like Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) since it is
one of the strongest encryption though it uses a symmetric algorithm. With this type of
encryption, we can use AES 256-bit encryption and AES 128-bit encryption. It is also important
that we know whether a message or links are for malicious purposes. Training is the best way to
do it and it is also a must to always install an anti-virus. Additionally, our files must be encrypted
strongly to prevent threats from coming. We should always be careful if the message we’re
decrypting is not embedded with viruses.