Ryan's Currently Unnamed Blog

For a long time now, I've signed just about every single email that I've sent. A lot of times people ask me what it is... and sometimes they even think its a virus or something.

If you really want a good explanation, there's a few good writeups of the whole process that you can read.. I'll post those at the end of my discussion and I'll probably cover most of it here.

First, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is an encryption system that's designed to be about as secure as you could expect, given that you don't have much control over the people on the internet. Encryption is actually a fascinating topic, and if you're at all interested in the history, political impact, or how this stuff works, I HIGHLY recommend The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh. It goes all the back over 2000 years ago and does a very good job of simply explaining the challenges to strong encryption systems, and how one would go about trying to break such a system. There are some technical parts, but also some entertaining stories so its not mind numbing like a textbook. My non-technical friends will still find the book enjoyable... Go! Read it! Now!

There are many strong encryption algorithms that are nearly impossible to break by simply trying every password due to the large number of the possible passwords and the processing time to attempt a decryption. Some systems thought to be strong have been defeated after finding a mathmatical shortcut which dramatically reduces the number of possible 'keys' or by the tremendous growth in computing power. Things that were considered unbreakable during World War I, due to it taking hundreds of years to work out the decryption by hand, can now be broken in seconds on a computer that's considered worthless and obsolete.

With that said... today's algorithms are strong, and it would take hundreds of years on the largest supercomputer clusters to defeat them. A far better strategy is to steal the password. Before the advent of Public Key Encryption Systems... the same password was used to encrypt and decrypt a message. This raises the question of how does one go about communicating the password? Remember the guys in spy movies with briefcases handcuffed to their wrist... well.. PGP is a modern day version of that!

But what if you don't trust the messenger? Even if the key to the briefcase is sent seperately, how do you know that there isn't some conspiracy to get at your stuff? As a mental excercise... try to come up with some solutions to that problem... How would you send a locked container to someone so that only they can open it?

I have lots more to write about, and there's a point to why I'm talking about all of this... I'll get to that in a later post... Bonus points to anyone who gets the answer right a comment (and if I told you the answer already, you don't count! don't give it away)