so this video is going to be a very basic introduction to what encryption actually is.
encryption is not super complicated, but at its core, the goal is really to protect data.
data or messages or anything like that.
the goal of encryption is to hide it from those who shouldn't be able to read it and be able to be read by those who should.
at the most basic level, that is all encryption is meant to do.
and that is the entire goal of encryption.
obviously, with technology these days, encryption has come a long way because it helps protect all the information we send every single day.
the most basic example of encryption would be taking a very simple message, maybe even a message that contains some sensitive data like this one here, and using some sort of encryption to then to then jumble that message up.
so anyone that doesn't understand how to unjumble it up, can't read it.
if anyone was to see the message here, it's just a bunch of nonsense.
the encrypted message doesn't make sense.
the sender or receiver should understand how to decrypt the message to see the original contents and therefore be able to read the original message.
at the simplest level, encryption works in one clear way.
you have your original message.
this is your plain text, and then you have an encryption method.
you have some way to actually encrypt the message.
and then you have your output, which is known as the ciphertext or the encrypted message.
and these are the three fundamental building blocks of encryption, the plain text, the ciphertext, and the encryption method itself, which can be called different things, a type of cipher.
so to take a simple example, you have a message like hello, and you want to use some sort of basic cipher, in this case, like a caesar cipher, and it outputs this as the cipher text.
now a caesar cipher is one of the most fundamental and basic types of ciphers.
if you have that hello message, essentially what a caesar cipher does is takes a look at the entire alphabet and using the shift code, in this case, a shift of one, it will output an encrypted version of that message by shifting each letter in the alphabet by one.
so an h in this example would become an i and e would become an f and l would become an m and an o would become a p. and then the output of text would be i f mmp.
now this is a very basic type of cipher, obviously, because it's very easy to reverse engineer it to understand what happened.
if you only had the ifmmp portion, you could very easily say, oh, what if i shifted each letter in the alphabet by one?
well, you would get back your original text, which is hello.
but this is the most basic cipher you can come up with with a caesar cipher with a shift of one.
meaning you just shift the letters one place in the alphabet and that is your encryption method.
so obviously this is the most basic version of encryption you can have, but encryption nowadays is much, much more complicated.
it usually involves very long keys that can be 200, 500, even 3000, characters long.
and those keys you go through a special algorithm and that special algorithm contains a bunch of special math that is really hard to reverse engineer.
and we'll dive into all of that throughout this encryption course.
but if you're watching this video through the free course here at dark web academy, you probably won't get introduced to too much of that.
so all you need to know is that encryption keeps things secure.
hopefully you enjoyed this video.
if you have any questions, let me know.
otherwise, we'll see you in the next one.