Key Escrowing: History and How it Affects You Essay -- Technology Encr

Key Escrowing: History and How it Affects You Keys and key escrowing are important topics in the world of business today. If they are important in business why should you be concerned with them? This paper will cover what are private and public keys and key escrowing. It will discuss the benefits, disadvantages, issues of the past concerning these topics, and why you should have an interest in them. Private & Public Keys Private keys are mostly a thing of the past. They are simple and easy to have intercepted. The way private keys work is this: a message is written and encrypted by the sender using a key; next the receiver of the message is given the key along with the message; they are then able to decode what was written (Baase, 88). The problem with this is that there is really no need to encode the message. If you have to give the key to the receiver, why not just give them the message not encrypted? Public keys provide much more security. In public key procedure, public and private keys are made. The public key is given to whoever would like to write an encrypted message. Once the message is encrypted and sent to the receiver, they use their private key to decode the message. Only the private key is able to decode. Not even the public key is able to decode what it just encoded (Baase, 95). If the encrypted document fell into the wrong hands, that person would have no way of deciphering it. Only the person possessing the private key has the ability to read the message. The government does not like this because illegal activities can be planned or talked about through this method without the government having any knowledge about it. That is why the government came up with the idea of key e... ...does key escrowing mean to the common person? First of all, information that you provide to banks, insurance agencies, hospitals, etc. is confidential information that is encrypted when it is sent electronically. If someone acquired a key that was not meant to, your information could be spread or sold. Your privacy would be breached. This is also an easy way for the government to store information on citizens. If they have keys to all encrypted documents, they would be able to access information at any time whether necessary or not. The idea of key escrowing is to protect the country. Its main intention is to raise the level of security. Terrorists or criminals could be caught before a serious incident occurred. Works Cited Baase, Sara. A Gift of Fire: Social, Legal, and Ethical Issues in Computing. Prentice Hall, Inc. Upper Saddle River, NJ. 1997.