Understanding the vocabulary of protection

There are many techniques to protect your data; below we'll briefly introduce six of the most popular ones and you will see more detailed explanations and practical implementations throughout this chapter:

• Encryption and decryption: These are a two-way process to convert your data from clear text into crypto-text and back again.
• Hashes: This is a one-way process to generate a hash value to securely store passwords, or can be used to detect malicious changes or corruption of your data.
• Signatures: This technique is used to ensure that data has come from someone you trust by validating a signature that has been applied to some data against someone's public key.
• Authentication: This technique is used to identify someone by checking their credentials.
• Authorization: This technique is used to ensure that someone has permission to perform an action or work with some data by checking the roles or groups...