The Necessity Of Computer Security Essay Research

The Necessity Of Computer Security Essay, Research Paper

The Necessity Of Computer Security

When the first electronic computers emerged from university and military

laboratories in the late 1940s and early 1950s, visionaries proclaimed them the

harbingers of a second industrial revolution that would transform business,

government and industry. But few laymen, even if they were aware of the

machines, could see the connection. Experts too, were sceptical. Not only were

computers huge, expensive, one-of-a-kind devices designed for performing

abstruse scientific and military calculations, such as cracking codes and

calculations missile trajectories, they were also extremely difficult to handle.

Now, it is clear that computers are not only here to stay, but they have a

profound effect on society as well. As John McCarthy, Professor of Computer

Science at Stanford University, speculated in 1966: “The computer gives signs of

becoming the contemporary counterpart of the steam engine that brought on the

industrial revolution – one that is still gathering momentum and whose true

nature had yet to be seen.”

Today’s applications of computers are vast. They are used to run ordinary

household appliances such as televisions and microwaves, to being tools in the

workplaces through word processing, spreadsheets, and graphics software, to

running monumental tasks such as being the heart and soul of the nations tax

processing department, and managing the project timetables of the Space Shuttle.

It is obvious that the computer is now and always will be inexorably linked to

our lives, and we have no choice but to accept this technology and learn how to

harness its total potential.

With any progressing technology, an unauthorized application can almost be

found for it. A computer could and has been used for theft and fraud – for

example, as a database and manager of illegal activities such as drug

trafficking and pornography. However, we must not just consider the harmful

applications of the computer, but also take into account the good that they have

caused.

When society embraced the computer technology, we have to treat this as an

extension of what we already have at hand. This means that some problems that

we had before the computer era may also arise now, in the form where computers

are an accessory to a crime.

One of the problems that society has faced ever since the dawn of

civilization is privacy. The issue of privacy on the Internet has risen many

arguments for and against having it. The issue of privacy has gotten to the

point where the government of the United States has placed a bill promoting a

single chip to encrypt all private material on the Internet.

Why is privacy so important. Hiding confidential material from intruders

does not necessarily mean that what we keep secret it illegal. Since ancient

times, people have trusted couriers to carry their messages. We seal out

messages in a envelope when sending mail through the postal service. Using

computer and encrypting programs to transfer electronic messages securely is not

different from sending a letter the old-fashioned way. This paper will examine

the modern methods of encrypting messages and analyse why Phil Zimmerman created

an extremely powerful civilian encipherment program, called the PGP, for “Pretty

Good Privacy.” In particular, by focusing on cryptography, which was originally

intended for military use, this paper will examine just how easy it is to

conclude why giving civilians a military-grade encrypting program such as the

PGP may be dangerous to national security. Therefore, with any type of new

technology, this paper will argue that the application of cryptography for

civilian purposes is not just a right, but is also a necessity.

Increasingly in today’s era of computer technology, not only banks but also

businesses and government agencies are turning to encryption. Computer security

experts consider it best and most practical way to protect computer data from

unauthorized disclosure when transmitted and even when stored on a disk, tape,

of the magnetic strip of a credit card.

Two encryption systems have led the way in the modern era. One is the

single-key system, in which data is both encrypted and decrypted with the same

key, a sequence of eight numbers, each between 0 and 127. The other is a 2-key

system; in this approach to cryptography, a pair of mathematically complementary

keys, each containing as many as 200 digits, are used for encryptions and

decryption. In contrast with ciphers of earlier generations, where security

depended in part on concealing the algorithm, confidentiality of a computer

encrypted message hinges solely on the secrecy of the keys. Each system is

thought to encrypt a message so inscrutably that the step-by-step mathematical

algorithms can be made pub

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