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Book Overview & Buying
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Table Of Contents
Executive's Cybersecurity Program Handbook
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You may think of encryption as a way for bad people to keep information secret from authorities. This battle is nothing new – it has been around since the 1990s and continues today. Encryption, however, has many benefits, as you may or may not know. For instance, we can ensure documents have not been altered, validate software, verify someone’s email address, and even ensure the privacy of our data.
The simplest benefit of the bunch is validating documents using hashing. When we spoke about passwords in this chapter, we learned that hashing is used to protect a password from prying eyes. A hash is a one-way encryption method that can be used to encrypt passwords; however, it can also be used to verify the authenticity of a document. What if you wanted to create a document and ensure that it was never altered? A hash of the document is one way of doing this.
If you were to create a file with Hello, world written in it, you would get a SHA1...