No wonder that online presence is a must for every single business looking to serve a group of the targeted audience out there. But, due to the ease of internet access and the scope of rapid advancements in technology, digital marketing benefits come along with cyber risks as well.
May it be the vulnerability to the public data preserved by the company to provide a good experience or the exchanged data that contains confidential payment information, online presence undoubtedly has some risks for sure. But, a strong line of defence like digital certificates that encrypt the data exchange and secure the entire environment always comes to the rescue.
This is why every single active business out there invests in digital certificates as a priority. Well, one of the advanced encryption techniques i.e. Asymmetric Encryption is recently in buzz to ensure a fully secured business environment. In this blog, let’s discuss the benefits of Asymmetric Encryption for which every organization should go. So, let’s dig deeper!
What makes Asymmetric Encryption better than symmetric ones?
The normal symmetric encryption or the cryptography mechanism is the one that uses a single key to encrypt and decrypt the exchanged data. So, only one key is used to encrypt the data by the certificate owner and the same can be used to decrypt it by the recipient.
But, there is a catch in this encryption mechanism. Although it is great for the enormous amount of data and multiple entities, managing the data, identifying the user, and distributing keys are quite challenging. So, if an error occurs in the message or a payment transaction, it will take hours to get to the endpoint that caused it.
Asymmetric Encryption or Asymmetric cryptography overcomes this drawback by using a pair of keys i.e., public and private keys. So, the public key that is with the certificate owner uses it to encrypt the exchangeable data and the recipient needs to use the corresponding private key to decrypt or decipher the text to access or read the information in it.
Now that the added private key is with the recipient and only a specific user or entity can access the exchanged data, it is easier to identify the vulnerability in the data flow. You can find more differences between Asymmetric key Encryption and Symmetric Encryption, but it is the basic difference that every business looks out for.
Key Advantages of Asymmetric Cryptography
Secures data Exchanges in Public Channels
The main purpose of asymmetric encryption is to encrypt the exchangeable data in public channels. So, it not only secures the data that is to be exchanged over a secure network but also offers data integrity without requiring the exchange of keys.
Unpredictable and Large Encryption keys
Unlike symmetric encryption, this contains a unique and large random number’s string that are almost unpredictable by a common cyber attacking technique. If the private key is not used, it will indeed take a lot of time and probably supercomputers to guess the random numbers that altogether form the key.
Besides, every single website that is using SSL certificates has a different set of key pairs which makes the guess almost impossible.
Ensures data Integrity with Digital Signatures
The digital signature is used to ensure the integrity and accuracy of the emails, documents, or other data types. It aims at notifying the recipient of the document concerning any kind of data tampering in the middle of the data flow. By doing this, it also recognizes any kinds of unauthorized modifications by using a function called hashing.
Secure website
Asymmetric Encryption is always the best choice when it comes to securing the website by using SSL or TLS certificates. So, when the end-user opens a website on any browser, it initiates the handshake process for server-to-client authentication.
The browser will send the public key along with the SSL/TLS certificate. Later on, the browser will generate a pre-master secret and encrypts it using the public key, and retains it back to the server. This data can be decrypted only by using the private keys that the server contains.
Both the parties can generate the master secret as well as identical session keys to secure the exchangeable information. So, no intruder can breach the network to access and read the data by any form of a security breach.
Simplifies the key distribution
One of the top benefits of Asymmetric Encryption is the easier distribution of public keys even to a large number of endpoints. As the process secures the exchangeable data better than the standard ones, there will be nothing to worry about.
So, you can now distribute the public key without any compromises to the data as the recipient must use the corresponding private key to access the data. Well, the chances of data exposure are already less as you are not going to assign the same private key to multiple users or entities.
Conclusion
Although both standard and asymmetric cryptography have some pros and cons, the advantages of asymmetric encryption make it the most preferable cryptography mechanism to secure a business environment.