The 9th week of my study's diary focused on the topic of cryptography, as mentioned in my last review, including the brief history of cryptography, its areas of usage (banking, communication, files security, authentication, etc.), cyphertexts and keys, symmetric and asymmetric keys (private and public). I really like ciphers, so I am interested in this topic.
Cryptography is a specialised area of mathematics concerned with protecting information so that it can be transmitted and received securely even when there is a risk that a hostile third party might intercept or modify the data.
The interesting part was the usage of cryptography, icluding listo of tools and services which are heavily encrypted. This course also offers some very practical tutorials how to set up those tools or how to protect your data. I personally do not need those instructions, I have my own security measures and as the data protection goes, I know how to set up my preferences on services like Google or Facebook, so this part is not for me. It makes around 35-40% of this course, but it is understandable because the course aims to introduce this topic to absolute begginers.
I liked the part that focuses on the authentication of one's identity thanks to encryption and the mechanics of hashing used to prove identity for digital signatures or certificates. The hashing part was quite hard to understand, but a lot of case studies and examples were helpful. I also liked that the couse goes more into detail when expleining securing transmision data while for example online shopping, using TLS/SSL protocols.
I really like this course, because in some way it is like looking into something you thought was a complete blackbox (just like people nowadays see AI), but there is a lot to see and understand. Of course the encryption itself is still being treated a such blackbox, like it is an action that just somehow happens somewhere inside.
As the structure of this course goes, there are test available only in purchased version of the course, but to compare it with the first course, I have notice some differences. This course is diveded into more parts, sometimes I do not understand why is some article divided into more stages. There is a fixed number of stages in each chapter, but the stages have very uneven lenght, which I am not a big fan of. This course also offers a lot of ideas and tips for your own activities and tools, and has the mentioned practical side to itself. I really like that I am learning new things, which I unfortunatelly did not in the first course, which was quite basic to me.