Encryption is a very simple concept. You scramble information so that it cannot be read by other people. The math or algorithm that you use to scramble the information just needs to be good enough so that other people can’t decipher your encrypted data. What could be simpler? If all you wanted to do was hide information from everyone else…this would be pretty much it.

The application of encryption in the real world, however, is a bit more involved. It is true that you don’t need to understand the complex math behind encryption to deploy it or use it. However, you do need to understand the various types of encryption and the implications and applications of using them.

My name is Paul Mahon and welcome to my hands-on course on encryption. I’ll teach you about symmetric encryption, public key encryption, digital signatures, hashing and digital certificates with SSL/TLS

We’ll use some basic python code and other open source applications to implement what we have learned. No worries if you’re not familiar with python – it’s a few simple lines of code. However, this will be a good application of python if you are.

At the end of this course you should have a thorough understanding of encryption and the importance of things like key lengths, ciphers, hashing algorithms and certificate authorities.

This course is designed for anyone that wants to tinker around with encryption to understand how it actually works in the real world. It’s also helpful for professionals that need to know about encryption for their job or students of information security.