 TITLE: Should I Encrypt Sensitive Files on My Computer? CONTENT: How Does Encryption Work?\n-------------------------\nEncryption is the process of scrambling information so it can't be read without a key. As the owner of the data, you'll have the ability to unscramble the data by using a password, biometric information or something else.\nEncryption turns a normally readable message that you want to save or send, broadly referred to as plaintext, into an encrypted message, or ciphertext. The key decrypts the ciphertext back into plaintext.\nA simple example of encryption is a method you may have encountered before in a spy novel or war drama. Let's say you have a message where the plaintext is \"hello.\" The message gets encrypted by shifting each letter in the message over one space in the alphabet, so that the encrypted message (or ciphertext) appears as \"ifmmp.\" This is called a shift cipher, also known as Caesar's cipher.\nThe key needed to decrypt the message would simply be the number times and the direction in which the letters in the message were shifted. In the above example, you would just need to know or figure out that the letters in the message were shifted one time, forward in the alphabet. Someone who intercepts the message won't immediately know what it says, but a recipient with the correct key can quickly decrypt the ciphertext.\nOf course, many people, and certainly today's computers, could figure out how to decrypt a message that's encrypted with a simple letter-shift cipher. Astronomically more complex methods are used to encrypt computer files and information that's sent online, but the same general concept gets applied. END