The Pros And Cons Of Digital Privacy

1.0 Introduction

Each day, billions of people worldwide depend on the security of digital systems. From medical history and test results at a hospital, to financial information and account statements at a bank, or social connections and personal messages on a smart phone, nearly every facet of a person’s life has some component of personal data associated with it that is stored on a computer. Furthermore, new forms of personal data to collect are being identified, gathered, analyzed, and stored all the time. This growth in the collection of personal data is so immense that the amount of digital data in existence approximately doubles every two years, and large companies are responsible for creating about 80% of this data increase (Gantz & Reinsel, 2011).

However, due to the expansive and integral nature of digital data in contemporary society, the imperfect security systems that protect the privacy of this data are easily disregarded

In the worst case, an entire database of private data could be accessible to the attacker and whomever he or she chooses to share it with. To prevent the recovery of this key by repeated guessing of each possibility, called a “brute force” attack by cryptographers because there is no intelligent method behind it, the key is made relatively long. Even with the rapid throughput of computer processing, a standard computer could take many thousands of years to try all of the potential 128-bit long keys. In response to the increasing resistance of encryption designs to these brute force attacks, security researchers have identified more complex methods of attack on encryption which use the analysis of physical characteristics to obtain the encryption key (Liu, Chang, & Lee, 2012). These methods are known collectively as side channel