> Surely anyone who can see the handshake can also decrypt what follows. If I understand your claim here, it seems that you aren't yet familiar with key pair c

> Surely anyone who can see the handshake can also decrypt what follows. If I understand your claim here, it seems that you aren't yet familiar with key pair cryptography. It's not enough for someone to witness the handshake - they need to actually possess the 'private' key of one a party in order to decrypt traffic that has been encrypted with that party's 'public' key. It's an amazing feat of mathematics; the fact that it is possible suggests, at least to me, that the physics of the universe in some sense favor the evolution of verifiable private communications. Here's the wikipedia article on key-pair crypto (often simply called "public key crypto"): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography