Friday, October 10, 2014

distinction between encrypting and encoding

It is not true to say that that which is encrypted cannot be unencrypted and that the only use case for encryption is doing things like encrypting a would-be answer for "What is the password?" to attempt to match it against an encrypted password at a database. Data may be encrypted and then decrypted using a key. An encoding also of course may be decoded, but the distinction is that anyone may decode an encoding without knowing a key. What is more, the mapping-to-something-all-but-impossible-to-reverse-engineer in the password scenario I just mentioned would typically be thought of as hashing and not encrypting.

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