If radio waves are just non-visible light waves that are picked up by a vibrating rod, how does a radio wave get “encrypted” so that it can’t be picked up unless it’s unencrypted?
Edit: Everyone keeps commenting that the content of the message is what’s encrypted, not the radio waves itself, but that’s not what I mean. Someone answered that digital signals themselves can be modulated or disguised, which is what I meant when I asked
In: Technology
The content that they’re holding is encrypted.
Let’s take a basic Caesar shift. Every letter in a phrase is shifted along the alphabet by a predetermined amount. So if I start with the phrase “explain like I’m five”, I’ll get “hasodlq olnh l’p ilyh”. I transmit that over the radio waves. The receiver on the other end knows to expect a Caesar shift, so they undo it and get the original phrase.
In Networking we actually divide the entire end to end communication into seven distinct layers. Layer 1 is the physical transmission medium (i.e., radio waves in this case, ethernet cables in others, etc.). That layer is only responsible for the contents of it’s own layer, and anything else beyond it can be swapped out for anything else without any changes. The encryption would be at a much higher layer that doesn’t really care about the medium that carries it.
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