P Vs. NP: The Controversy

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P vs. NP: The Controversy
Today’s businesses and organizations need privacy. They need to keep their employee’s information, trade secrets, financial records, and many other sensitive documents that cannot be shown to the public. To do this, these organizations use encryption. Encryption is using an irreversible program to turn a file into gibberish. To translate the gibberish back to the original contents of the file, you must use a decryption program and provide a password. This is so the program can decrypt the file correctly. This encryption is what prevents cybercriminals who happen to get a hold of any files from looking at file contents. To the cybercriminal, encrypted files are completely useless unless he can figure out how it was encrypted. In order to decrypt the file, the cybercriminal must first find a series of steps that can decrypt the file over and over again: an algorithm. …show more content…

On top of that, there is an infinite number of files that could be encrypted. It only takes one file to not work correctly with the decryption program to prove that it doesn’t work. This makes it extremely difficult for this cybercriminal to decrypt the stolen files. Decrypting encrypted files is what’s classified as a “Non-Deterministic Polynomial Time” (NP) problem. This is because it can be easily checked (just run the program against an encrypted file that you already have a decrypted version of), but cannot be consistently solved in a reasonable amount of time

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