(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Morning Open Thread. Rivest, Shamir, Adleman. And Shannon. Who the heck, you ask? [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-11 “Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” ― Edward Snowden You’re on a secret mission. Your mission is to deliver a sheaf of papers containing the encryption/decryption keys for the secret messages that your side uses. If you don’t get caught, the encrypted messages will never be broken by your enemies because you’re carrying the one-time pads, the only kind of secret message encoding system that can’t be broken if used properly. Suddenly, brilliant lights flash on all around you and you find yourself surrounded by snarling dogs and very smug-looking military people. You. Are. Busted. Your side just lost the war. Ohooohhhh, way to go, you incompetent ninny. Shouldn’t have stayed in the bar for that last margarita, I guess. Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum. This is a post where you can come to share what’s on your mind and stay for the expansion. The diarist is on California time and gets to take a nap when he needs to, or may just wander off and show up again later. So you know, it's a feature, not a bug. Grab your supportive indulgence(s) of choice and join us, please. And if you’re brand new to Morning Open Thread, then Hail and Well Met, new Friend. But really, it’s not because you’re an incompetent ninny that you lost the war; you are in no way, shape or form an incompetent ninny; on the contrary you are an accomplished professional who has operated on the sly successfully for a couple of decades. No, you lost the war because you came up against the problem that has plagued secret messaging for thousands of years, right up until the late 1970’s: how to keep the key to the coding secret, or to be technical, the key distribution problem. In 1977, Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, researchers from the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, came up with the solution. It was profoundly simple: never distribute the key and it can’t be intercepted. But that seems to present an impossible conundrum: if you don’t share the key, you can’t send encrypted messages back and forth, right? Normally, this is absolutely correct. What Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman did was to figure out a way to encrypt messages with a key that everyone can know, a public key, but the ability to decrypt, a private key, never leaves the possession of the encrypter. We now use this every day in our lives, and it’s known as the RSA algorithm, or simply public key encryption. Some form of it is likely what takes place whenever you enter your bank card PIN at the checkout counter, or order something online. It’s not unbreakable, though. It would just take longer than the life of the universe to do so, even with all the computers in the world working on it and nothing else. That’s because creating the decryption/encryption keys (yeah, you do one and that generates the other) involves really, really, really, REALLY large prime numbers. Here’s how it works: Actually, it’s a little more open than that. But you do need to know that public key encryption is also known as asymmetric encryption; asymmetric because it’s “one-way”: it’s super simple to create a public password, retaining the components as the private decryption password, but cosmically difficult to break those private components back out of the composite public password. Mathematically, it involves the extreme difficulty of factoring very large numbers. Example: the non-trivial factors of the number 12 are 2, 3, 4, and 6. If you’ve ever taken college algebra then you’ve likely been exposed to factoring and know what a brain-busting-bog-monster this task can be. More example: what are the prime factors of 13,662? 2 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 11 x 23, as it turns out, but that’s only simple for me because I multiplied my birth date 11-23-54 together to get 13,662. Otherwise, it would be a muthah to figure out. What it involves is trying, in sequence, every single prime number until you figure it out. That may not be as easy to understand as a more simple analogy: let’s say you (you’re Bob) have a strongbox and a padlock, so you send the box and the lock to the person (Alice) you want to secretly communicate with, but you don’t lock the padlock to begin with. You leave the padlock open (and you and only you have the key/combination and it’s assumed both the padlock and the strongbox are impervious to being broken into once locked). You can send this open box & lock right through any public shipping service. It has no value otherwise. Then, when Alice gets your box & lock, she writes a message (steamy, it is!) to you, puts the paper in the box, snaps the lock shut onto the box, and puts the package back in the mail. Incidentally, she also included her own open lock in the box with her message and only she has the keys to this lock. When you get the package you open the lock on the locked box with Alice’s very sensitive message inside and you can do this because the lock is YOUR LOCK and ONLY YOU HAVE THE KEY TO THAT LOCK AND THAT KEY HAS NEVER LEFT YOUR POSSESSION. Then, you write a reply to Alice, put your opened lock in the box with your message, and lock the box with ALICE’S LOCK. When Alice gets it, she opens her lock, reads your message, and the cycle can repeat; she sends her opened lock and a new message inside the box (with your locked padlock on it now) back to you. The open padlock represents the public key, snapping it shut represents encrypting a message. Opening it with the private key represents decrypting a message. Here’s more, if you need it. Mixing paint is another analogy for an asymmetric function, real simple to mix paint and get a new color, virtually impossible to unmix and figure out exactly which tints and percentages of tints were used in the first place. This video runs a bit longer and is more in-depth and you can skip it if you want, but it’s pretty well done and I suggest you make the time for it. [At the 8:30 mark, you see the numbers “P1” and “P2”. It is these prime number factors that are the private key; you must have both these numbers for decryption, but the composite number “N” that you get by multiplying P1 and P2 together are what create the public key, the key used for encryption. Hang in there because it all comes together at the 13:30 mark.] Rather sadly, Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman are hardly household names like Edison, Bell, and Gates. But they should be. Your internet data security would not exist were it not for these guys. * * * * * Now that you know who the heck R & S & A are, who the heck is Shannon and why should you care? Well, if it wasn’t for Claude Shannon you wouldn’t be reading this. But, Shannon is for next week. 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