73

I've been trying to get my head around this and I've watched a few videos but they don't seem to specifically answer my question.

According to what I've found online, messages encrypted with a public key can only be decrypted with a private key. But in practice, how is that possible?

Surely a public key contains a set of instructions, and anyone could just run those instructions in reverse to decrypt a message? If everything you need to encrypt a message is stored within a public key, then how is it a one-way process?

It's likely that I'm misunderstanding a core element of this!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] OmegaMouse@pawb.social 4 points 7 months ago

Ah thanks for the useful links! Those articles are all quite fascinating. In the plaintext attacks article, I love the tactic mentioned here:

At Bletchley Park in World War II, strenuous efforts were made to use (and even force the Germans to produce) messages with known plaintext. For example, when cribs were lacking, Bletchley Park would sometimes ask the Royal Air Force to "seed" a particular area in the North Sea with mines (a process that came to be known as gardening, by obvious reference). The Enigma messages that were soon sent out would most likely contain the name of the area or the harbour threatened by the mines

[-] rufus@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Both cryptography and that part of history are fascinating topics. I can also recommend watching "The Imitation Game" with Benedict Cumberbatch starring as Alan Turing... I mean it's just a movie and skips lots of the interesting stuff and details. YMMV.

It's the beginning of computers. And I think especially that time has some interesting stories, discoveries/inventions and personas. There is also the history and role of women in computing which I think is something more people should know about and it's related to that. After that we needed secrecy in the cold war. I think public key cryptography hasn't been around until the 1970s. There had been export regulations on cryptography until after I was born. And modern encryption algorithms like AES are from the 1990s. Nowadays everyone and their grandma relies on the availability of secure communications.

I think I spent some nights jumping from Wikipedia article to Wikipedia article and reading all of that.

this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
73 points (100.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35830 readers
1188 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS