End-to-end encryption

Relevance: Mains: G.S Paper III: Science and technology

• Globally, intelligence and law enforcement agencies are arguing that end-to-end encryption makes it much harder to track terrorists, pedophiles and human traffickers as it makes it nearly impossible for them to get access to people’s digital communications.

Working:

• End-to-end encryption takes place on either end of a communication. A message is encrypted on a sender’s device, sent to the recipient’s device in an unreadable format, then decoded for the recipient.
• For doing this, a program on your device mathematically generates two cryptographic keys — a public key and a private key.
• The public key can be shared with anyone who wants to encrypt a message to you. The private key, or secret key, decrypts messages sent to you and never leaves your device.

How is it different from other forms of encryption?

• Transport layer encryption relies on a third party, like a tech company, to encrypt messages as they move across the web.
• With this type of encryption, law enforcement and intelligence agencies can get access to encrypted messages by presenting technology companies with a warrant or national security letter. The sender and recipient would not have to know about it.
• End-to-end encryption ensures that no one can eavesdrop on the contents of a message while it is in transit. It forces spies or snoops to go directly to the sender or recipient to read the content of the encrypted message.