Hamish stores confidential documents on his laptop - OCR - GCSE Computer Science - Question 3 - 2019 - Paper 1

1. Use Strong Passwords: Hamish can implement strong, unique passwords for his laptop and encrypted documents, ensuring they cannot be easily guessed or cracked by unauthorized users.

2. Enable Two-Factor Authentication (2FA): By enabling 2FA, Hamish adds an additional layer of security that requires an extra verification step beyond just entering a password, thus reducing the chances of unauthorized access.

Encryption is a process that converts readable data into an encoded format, making it inaccessible to unauthorized users. This helps protect Hamish’s documents in several ways:

1. Data Security: Even if attackers gain access to the laptop, the encrypted documents remain unreadable without the proper decryption keys, thereby protecting sensitive information.

2. Confidentiality: Encryption ensures that only authorized users with the correct decryption keys can access the content of the documents, thus maintaining their confidentiality.

To complete the pseudocode for performing a Caesar cipher, the following lines should be added:

04 for count = 0 to messageLength - 1
06 ASCIIValue = ASCIIValue + 1
10 newMessage = newMessage + CHR(ASCIIValue)

Line 12 to output the encrypted message could be:

12 output(newMessage)