Does anyone have any links to tutorials on how to encrypt something using a modern, commonly used encryption technique. I tried googling but found nothing that explains it clear enough. I was thinking maybe AES. If someone wouldn't mind even giving a brief explanation here it would be much appreciated.
@Yemeni Cpluspluser I know that, I am looking for a modern technique that I could possible use in a "commercial" product. But thank you for the response.
@giblit AFAIK hashing is not a form of encryption and it is irreversible. But I'll do some Googling to make sure. Thank you.
What's the point of doing encryption that's widely used?
Because any algorithm devised by someone who has literally just started foraying into cryptography is likely to be laughably trivial to crack. Like, for example, if said algorithm is "XOR in addition to another algorithm"...
XOR are quite easy to crack the short version is this
1) Determine how long the key is. This is done by XORing the encrypted data with itself shifted various numbers of places and then examining how many bytes are the same.
2) If the bytes that are equal are greater then a certain percentage, then you have shifted the data by a multiple of the key length. By finding the smallest amount of shifting that results in a large amount of equal bytes, you find the key length.
3) Shift the text by the key length and XOR against itself.
It should take only a matter of minutes to crack the XOR encryption. More can be read here http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/4/10/174741/423
or here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigen%C3%A8re_cipher#Cryptanalysis
That's why after it's encrypted with XOR, you would then encrypt it with whatever algorithm you'd like. It'd be to throw the cracker off. (Not meant in a racist remark)
I have successfully made an RSA encryption prototype in python. At the moment it only accepts numbers less than the public key (n) but I will be changing that soon. It was just to ensure I got the concept. I used 17 and 19 as my primes and encrypted the number 3. I am going to be working on a faster squaring method (Exponentiation by Squaring) and speeding up the process in general.