Cryptography for all

Not so long ago terms like “cryptography”, “encryption”, “authentication” and others associated in ordinary people’s mind like something mysterious, used by spies, intelligence and secret radio transmissions. When we see in movies about secret operations, encrypted transmissions (like german encrypting machine “Enigma”), we feel like this is something unreachable for ordinary people.

Even now if you ask any your friend or colleague does he or she need cryptography and encryption, they probably answer that they don’t and associate this questions with some spy stuff. But situation with cryptography around us has changed dramatically in last 15 years. Encryption is not everywhere around us, but it’s significance and importance for protection of our personal and business interests have risen drastically.

We don’t notice this in our daily life, but if you withdraw money from ATM, buy goods in Internet, we are using cryptography to protect ourselves. In your credit card with chip, you have a digital certificate and private key that your bank gave to you to protect your data and money from fraud. Access to this certificate is allowed when you enter your pin code – and this is all cryptography.
So cryptography is already a reality of our life guarding our interests and personal data. But we did not become secret service agents?