learnTrendz Community
| Encoding and Encryption: | back |
In todays technical documents, articles and jargons you may have encountered countless times the terms Encoding and Encryption. Those are terms which automatically come to mind when we need to hide or conceal some document or source code. It is common to see most people are using Encryption and Encoding interchangeably. Then What is Encoding and what is Encrypting?
Encoding
to change a message into symbols, as encode oral language into writing, encode an idea into words, encode a physical law into mathematical symbols.
Encryption
The process of converting information into a form unintelligible to anyone except holders of a specific cryptographic key.
So, according to above two definitions, we can see though it seems as similar at the first glance, there is a major difference between the two terms. Simply, Encryption (someone calls this encipherment) is something like making a secret letter by changing, swapping, or replacing characters in previously defined order (This can be called 'the Key'). The ‘format’ of the message is not changed. this can be also called 'ciphertex'.
When we do encoding, the format of the data is changed. For example when we record a voice sample, the recorder will encode the analog voice signals into digital signals and store. Here the format has changed. The encoded data is not necessarily a 'secret' as we seen in the encryption.
Usage:
Encryption is widely using when security is matters. There are many methods for encryption but the widely used, most common, and most efficient Encryption method is called PGP (some called it Pretty Good Privacy). A good mysterious encryption which remains unsolved even for today can be found at nowhere other than CIA headquarters. [link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos ]
Encoding is widely used today in Internet technology. For example When we want to use ‘&’ with urls we 'URL encode' it to '%26'