In the ever-expanding world of cyber communications, cyber attacks are becoming more and more common. Developers who want to protect their user base from attacks resort to encryption methods for safekeeping. A prominent example is end-to-end encryption.
According to a Fundera survey, cyberattacks on small businesses have increased by more than 400% in the past year. The same survey also found that only 22% of these small businesses encrypt their databases. There are various security measures that small businesses and crypto projects/protocols can take to prevent such attacks on their customer information and businesses. One of these measures is to use products or work with companies that use end-to-end encryption (E2EE).
Why end-to-end encryption (E2EE)?
End-to-end encryption (E2EE) allows users much more privacy. For example, if a conversation between two people is encrypted, no one else can see the content of the conversation. In contrast, chats via some apps such as Facebook Messenger are unencrypted. This means Facebook can see all messages between communicators using this app. Aside from chat apps, E2EE can also occur in other services such as email communication. For example, PGP encryption and Protonmail are used for E2EE encryption of emails. E2EE gives you the security to share and store confidential information or confidential personal conversations that you want other people to access. Data security prevents the risk of a breach of private customer information such as credit card details and passwords.
A survey by the U.S. National Cybersecurity Alliance found that 60% of small businesses that experience cyberattacks close operations within less than six months of the breach. Such data breaches typically result in monetary losses that cannot be easily recovered, and customer recovery is slow. Large-scale data breaches have been shown over time to have serious negative consequences for end users.
What is end-to-end encryption?
Encryption is a method of encrypting (encrypting) data to prevent it from being read by anyone other than the recipient, who can decrypt (decrypt) it. End-to-end encryption is a communication system in which only the sender and receiver can encrypt and decrypt the message between them. The first type of E2EE was known as Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and was published by Phil Zimmerman in the early 1990s. Encrypted shared information is not simply transmitted from sender to recipient; It passes through multiple Internet network nodes before being delivered, even if delivery is instantaneous.
End-to-end encrypted data cannot be accessed by an intermediary, even if it intercepts the data. The encryption can be symmetric or asymmetric. The same key is usually used to encrypt and decrypt symmetrically encrypted data. Conversely, there are different keys for encrypting and decrypting the shared data.
Public encryption encrypts a message and anyone can use it, while private key is used for decryption and only the recipient has such a key.
This is how end-to-end encryption works
Cryptography, the art of writing code, is the basis of all encryption. Information is encrypted by the codes generated from cryptography. The sender uses an encryption key to encrypt the data being transmitted, which can only be decrypted by the recipient. For example, when a credit card user uses their card with a payment system, the credit card data is automatically encrypted and remains with the payment processor before it can be decrypted.
Apps like Signal and WhatsApp encrypt data to ensure that only the sender and recipient can decrypt it. A key exchange typically starts all end-to-end encryption schemes. A crucial development in public key cryptography is the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. It was the first popular technique for securely developing and exchanging keys over an insecure channel and is still widely used in most security protocols such as PGP, SSH, IPSec and TLS.
What is a Diffie-Hellman key exchange?
Developed by cryptographers Ralph Merkle, Martin Hellman, and Whitfield Diffie, the Diffie-Hellman key exchange allows a sender and a receiver with no prior relationship to create a key through which they can communicate securely. Such a key can be combined with symmetric key algorithms to securely transmit data.
To understand how this key exchange works, let’s use an analogy of two people mixing paint – let’s call them Winfrey and Geoff. Suppose both agree to choose yellow as their common color. Then each person chooses a secret color that they won’t tell each other. Suppose Winfrey chooses red while Geoff chooses a slightly greenish blue.
Now they both have to mix their secret color with the mutually agreed yellow color. The result is a deeper blue for Geoff and an orange tone for Winfrey. After the mixing is complete, they switch colors. So Winfrey gets the deeper blue while Geoff gets the orange tone. The next step is for them to add their secret color to the exchanged colors they both received. So Winfrey adds red to the deeper blue, Geoff adds greenish blue to the orange mix. Ironically, the result was the same for both – a brown color. Thus, Winfrey and Geoff share a color that is unique to them.
This shared color is called the shared secret. The most important point to highlight in this analogy (one that is also a key reason why the Diffie-Hellman exchange works) is that both achieved the same result without revealing their common color throughout the communication channel. Therefore, an intruder who overhears the shared conversation can only access the shared color and the mixed colors exchanged. He won’t know the secret color.
The Diffie-Hellman key exchange structure allows two parties to communicate even over an extremely dangerous connection and still create a shared secret to encrypt their future communications. Because all shared secrets are never revealed over the connection, an eavesdropping attacker would not be able to access useful information.
Other methods of data encryption
In addition to E2EE, data can also be encrypted via tokenization and a built-in elliptic curve encryption scheme.
Tokenization involves using a non-sensitive piece of data (called a token) to replace a sensitive one. The token is only valid for the sensitive data; it has no value or meaning. Therefore, your business is safe as hackers cannot define the token as it is meaningless and worthless.
The integrated elliptic curve encryption scheme is a system that uses the “shared secret” to create independent bulk encryption and message authentication code (MAC) keys. Symmetric encryption is used to encrypt the data while Mac is used to encrypt the encryption.
Final thoughts on encryption
As more security and privacy-conscious apps come onto the market, it is important to note that end-to-end encryption cannot provide absolute protection against cyberattacks. However, it massively reduces the burden. Therefore, all crypto projects/protocols and small businesses will improve security by adopting E2EE. The sooner you start using it, the sooner you can start keeping your customer database safe and protected from cyberattacks.
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