Encoding, Encryption, Hashing, and Obfuscation in Java

So, it is possible to keep the communication confidential between them. One cannot determine the original data given only the output of a hashing algorithm. Yet it would be advisable to give both of them equal importance. Sometime back YouTube started offering premium content to its paid customers. A few streaming services started offering an ad-supported tier on their platform in addition to paid plans. Well, what is more important, encryption or encoding, comes down to the revenue model of the distribution platform.

As you can see, point 4 implies that hashing is not a reversible process, unlike encoding and encryption. Also, point 3 seems to say that, while you should get different hashes for distinct input data, it can’t be guaranteed. Actually, this point makes the difference between hashing algorithms.

Fundamentals in Data Risk Mitigation for Nonprofit Staff

Video encoding ensures that your video is converted from raw format to all the relevant format for video streaming. If you want, you can learn more about storing passwords using hashing and how to use salt to store them properly. Also, for a more technical comparison of encoding, encryption, and hashing, read this article. The challenge of authorized versus unauthorized people is to make data decryption without the key as hard as possible. This leads to applying a mix of cautions such as complex mathematical relationships between the keys, keeping them secret, changing them frequently, and so on. The main goal of encryption is to ensure data confidentiality, i.e., protecting data from being accessed by unauthorized parties.

The purpose of encoding is to encode a RAW video in a particular codec to ensure its efficient delivery over the network and playback support on the target device. Encryption, on the other hand, ensures that the video is not playable to anyone other than its intended audience. If you have ever heard of DRM, you know what I am trying to imply here.

Encoding vs Encryption: Similarities and differences

For example, if you want to store text on a hard drive, you’re going to have to find a way to convert your characters to bits. Alternatively, if all you have is a flash light, you might want to encode your text using Morse.

The result is always “readable”, provided you know how it’s stored. The part that isn’t publicly available are the secrets needed to decipher the data, not the actual scheme/algorithms (e.g. RSA, DH etc).

Encoding vs. Signing in Asymmetric Encryption

However, on some occasions, digital data contains private or sensitive information. So, guaranteeing confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity became a significant concern. Thus, we can conclude that asymmetric encryption is a relevant resource in this computing world.

For example, MD5 has been a very common hashing algorithm in the past, but in 2008 it was deprecated due to collision detection. The same happened to some early algorithms of the Secure Hashing Algorithms family.

Plain text

Anyone who knows the conversion algorithm can encode and decode data. On the contrary, it is public in order to facilitate interoperability between systems.

• However, signing data requires using these resources differently.
• The process is intended to be reversible so that the same algorithm used for encoding can also be used for decoding.
• It, like encoding, can often be reversed by using the same technique that obfuscated it.
• The real-life examples are sending someone a secret message that only they should be able to read, or securely sending a password over the Internet.
• You can see that the two hashes are different just by looking at the first characters.
• The original message is encrypted by the algorithm using a public key, and then the encrypted message can only be decrypted using the private key.

Encryption and encoding are reversible by the knowledge of appropriate key or scheme. One cannot reach to the original form of data by using a digest. Encryption and encoding also varies as encryption usually involves the use of keys and the keys are only known to authorized entities. In encoding, the algorithm which is used for encoding is publically known.

How Does Encryption Work?

We also work extremely hard to deliver the best viewer experience. We’d love to hear from you, and help boost your video streaming business. The footage undergoes encoding once again–this time to one of the consumer codecs. Consumer codecs have a higher compression ratio than professional codecs and thus are apt for end-user consumption. It allows systems that use different data representations to share information.

Encoding transforms data into another format using a scheme that is publicly available so that it can easily be reversed. It does not require a key as the only thing required to decode it is the algorithm that was used to encode it. The goal is not to keep information secret, but rather to ensure that it’s able to be properly consumed. For example, if data is encrypted with the private key, only the public key will decode it. In the most usual way, we use encryption methods to guarantee the confidentiality of digital data. It means that we transform the original data into a code that covers the true meaning of the data .

Encoding, Encryption, and Hashing

The result here is unreadable, unless you know the secret “key” with which is was encrypted. Hashing is used in conjunction with authentication to produce strong evidence that a given message has not been modified. This is accomplished by taking a given input, hashing it, and then signing the hash with the sender’s private key. Given some arbitrary data along with the output of a hashing algorithm, one can verify whether this data matches the original input data without needing to see the original data. Encryptionis a specific subset of encoding where the encoded messages can only be accessed by authorized parties .

• Thus, we can conclude that asymmetric encryption is a relevant resource in this computing world.
• Both encryption and encoding require specialized software and hardware to happen.
• Encoding is the process of transforming plaintext data from one form to another.
• For decryption, we must know the encryption key and the encryption algorithm.
• Actually, this point makes the difference between hashing algorithms.
• Irst, we briefly reviewed encryption concepts in the context of computing.
• For example, we use some encryption algorithm every time we send a password over the internet.
• Encryption is best adapted for unstructured fields or databases that are not transformed regularly or saved in multiple systems.

Similarly, HTTP does not allow all characters to be transmitted safely, so it may be necessary to encode data using base64 . Encryption is for maintaining data confidentiality and thus the ability to reverse the transformation are limited to certain people. To prove his identity, the owner of a private key encodes a signature, submitting it with the message. Thus, the receiver decodes the signature and checks if it corresponds to the expected signature for the received data. If the signature matches the expected, we can assume that the private key owner provided the received data.

That’s what the Adobe engineers learned in a data breach in 2013. The attackers who got access to their user database could break the encryption algorithm.