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But let's really get down to plain English. What is the best analogy to use when explaining public key cryptography to an educated, non-technical audience? I've
by loteck 11y ago
But let's really get down to plain English. What is the best analogy to use when explaining public key cryptography to an educated, non-technical audience? I've used the door-with-2-locks analogy previously. Is there a clearer analogy?
- tptacek 11y agoI really like the paint analogy on Wikipedia for explaining this concept to laypeople who will never need to understand how DH actually works. If you need to explain DH to someone who demands an understanding of what it actually does, DH is so easy that you might as well have them bang it out with small numbers in their scripting language of choice; you can talk someone though DH in about 4 minutes, and it even works as a sort of magic trick if there's a third person in the room who can hear your public values (again: use 2-3 digit numbers).
- thirsteh 11y agohttps://youtu.be/6NcDVERzMGw?t=165 https://youtu.be/6NcDVERzMGw?t=165
- idlewords 11y agoI like to tell people that the public key is like an (unlocked) padlock, and the private key is the combination that opens the padlock. It's a little clunky because the padlock in the analogy only works once, but it conveys the idea of being able to encrypt something securely that you can't then decrypt yourself.