– protect sensitive data (such as credit card numbers) that is transmitted
via some type of communications network.
– Encryption can be used to provide additional protection for sensitive
portions of a database as well. The data is encoded using some coding
algorithm.
– An unauthorized user who accesses encoded data will have difficulty
deciphering it, but authorized users are given decoding or decrypting
algorithms (or keys) to decipher the data.
– Encrypting techniques that are very difficult to decode without a key
have been developed for military applications.