Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the government

             The full title explains it all for this book by Steven Levy: Crypto: How the code rebels beat the government - saving privacy in the digital age. Crypto is the story of the people who invented the public key encryption scheme that is in use today. This technology is considered as "one of the most important technological breakthroughs in the last one thousand years."" There is no physical safe man can make that is totally secure against an intruder. Even the strongest safe can be broken into with sophisticated tools. However, armed with the power of mathematics, cryptography has come very close.
             A problem arises when trying to communicate securely with a stranger on an insecure channel. If I want to encrypt this message, and I have never been in contact with the receiver, how does that person know how to decrypt the message that I will send? If I send the key across the channel, it may be intercepted by an eavesdropper.
             This is where public key encryption comes in. Most ciphers we have known in the past are symmetrical. They are as easy to decrypt, as they are to encrypt. Public key encryption uses mathematical one-way functions to encrypt its message. One-way functions are easy to solve going one-way, but take much more computational time to solve the other way. Factoring certain numbers falls into this category. For example, to multiply four or five prime numbers is trivial with the use of a calculator. However, to come up with those original numbers only given the product is much more difficult.
             Going back to the original question, to send a message on a channel that is not secure requires some encryption. If I want to communicate with a complete stranger, that stranger must know the key in order to decrypt it. With public key encryption, instead of having one key, you have two. Everyone has their own "publicâ€" key, which can be published. Each person will also have their own "privateâ&...

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Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the government. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 15:48, March 28, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/92885.html