Decentralization Education is our short 10-15 minute segment where we explain technology terms and topics that we often reference during our regular podcast, The Decentralists. In this episode: a topic many people feel they know all about -- but do they?
What exactly is encryption?
Decentralization Education is our short 10-15 minute segment where we explain technology terms and topics that we often reference during our regular podcast, The Decentralists. In this episode: a topic many people feel they know all about -- but do they?
What exactly is encryption?
Henry: Hey everyone. It's Henry Mike and Chris of decentralization education. Now decentralization education is our short 10 to 15 minute segment where we explain technology terms and topics that we often reference during our regular podcast. The decentralized this time, a question that I think many people know or do they, Mike, what exactly is encryption?
Mike: I think if I was to try to stand up at a chalkboard with, like in a math class and explain encryption nobody would get it because that's kind of the intent. In encryption is mathematics and but it's kind of like, I want to say predictive mathematics, if that makes sense. So, the idea is, is encryption is, hey, kind of one of the first let's say algorithms. I mean, the first time you remember hearing about encryption, there was that movie last year or the year before on Alan touring and the Nazi enigma machine, which was a cipher, they used to call them or a cryptographer that's what encryption is. So, that back in the war, the Germans would type something into a typewriter.
The typewriter had an algorithm built in okay. Mathematical that said, just to make it easy on Tuesday, whenever you type a key, when you type an, A, it's not an A it's the key, right beside it, on the left and on Wednesday, when you type an it's the key, right beside it, on the right and the idea is you would have this garbled kind of Its nonsense, it's a piece of paper that has a bunch of numbers and letters and stuff all over it. It means nothing, it doesn't translate into any language. You can't point at that and say, oh, it says shoes, but if you have the key, right. and that's why they often talk about encryption keys, cause encryption itself. If I took any document or picture say I basically applied a mathematical algorithm to it, to scramble up all the words.
Then I did not have, the key, which is the way to solve the scramble go backwards. The theory is nobody can ever figure out what the original cipher was and so the idea is that if you take a piece of data like I said, a letter or a contract and you run it through an algorithm that scrambles it up, or sometimes what they do, for example, Henry is they scramble up your email address so that when you send an email to somebody, you'll see this string of numbers and random gobble go and that means that, okay, you can click a button. A good example is for all of you out here, who've ever used Craigslist. So, you go on Craigslist and you hit reply and you'll see this email that pops up and it's like a hundred characters long.
It says @craigslist.com or something, and it's because what they've done is they've taken your actual address, your actual contact information and rather than just posting it. So, anybody can know where you live, come to your house and steal that guitar. You want to sell them. There's this gobble go address. So, it protects you and me. It doesn't stop you and me from communicating. But what it does is it makes it hard for anybody in the middle who's listening or who potentially say receives that information and you sent it to me and all of a sudden Chris picked it up. They can't read it because they don't have the key. So, encryption is basically any piece of information that has a mathematical equation, which says the letter plus six is the real letter, something simple like that. You then scramble up the words and it's not readable by anybody unless they know the solution to the problem.
Henry: Okay. So, it seems that everything that we use these days is encrypted, for security purpose, because we hear the word all the time. I guess there was a time when not everything was, but the fact is how come that hasn't solved any issues?
Mike: Because I think the idea is simply because in a lot of cases, encryption, isn't the problem. So, some things are encrypted. So, you look at say a lot of times messaging systems are encrypted. They say end to end they say, but they're not end to end because Facebook can still contact you through WhatsApp. I mean, they're popping up a thing on May 15th saying, you need to accept this. Well, how can they do that? If it's encrypted end to end? You know what I mean? So, you got to think about these.
Henry: Well, they own the key mic, I guess.
Mike: Well, that, and there you go, right? I mean, how fair is that? Wait a second. So, I have this encrypted messaging system that I am supposed to have the keys to, but basically every time I cut a set of keys, a second one gets kept, gets cut and mark Zuckerberg puts it on his ring.
So, this is the type of thing where encryption is meant to allow anybody to secure anything. They want to send to someone for whatever reason they want, as long as they give the end user the key to read it and so there's good things. You can send pictures of your friends, you can communicate with your grandkids or whatever, secure that in the knowledge that nobody's reading it, because there's a key that is used by you Henry to go to basically, garble everything up and a key that's used by your grandson to Ungar everything. But there's also negatives. Hey, the key is the important part because at the end of the day, you look at this; you remember this Quade crypto scandal where basically $200 million worth of cryptocurrency went up and smoked because it was on an encrypted cryptocurrency exchange and the founder passed away with the key in his head, like he literally had the password.
Henry: It may have been a couple of words or a sentence or something.
Mike: Could have been a couple words, or sometimes that's what it is. Cryptocurrency wallets. Often what they do is they'll just bar up seven random word and that's your encryption key. If you forget that goodbye. So, the danger of encryption is not, everything should be encrypted, not everything that you have should be garbled up. Because if you need quick access, if you need to share it, if it's something that's not super important it's better to, to leave it out actually. So, that you don't end up in a situation where you're like, oh, I forgot the password. Oh, there goes my entire cryptocurrency fortune.
Henry: Okay. So essentially what you said is encryption is fantastic. It works. You have to have the key, however, in the centralized model that Facebook has WhatsApp and all these other messaging systems, they're the ones who provide the key. So, they have it and as well. So, indeed there's not really any privacy because they can look at what you're doing at any time.
Mike: Absolutely. If it's got a forgot password link, it's not yours.
Henry: Okay. So how does this relate to our peer social and many ones?
Mike: So, what we've done is we are using encryption as the actual basis of the connection between two people. Okay. So, where we differ with encryption, normally encryption would be, Henry has a document. Henry applies an algorithm to that document. Garbles up the contents and then sends a copy to me and gives me the key to open it. Okay. What we do is we take it one step for further. Henry, you create a key that allows me to access you and then I create a key that allows you to access me and then when we exchange those keys. So, I give you, my key. You give me your key. Those are combined into a shared address that we have where we can by clicking a button. I could talk directly to you, not through a server, not through Zuckerberg, not through Google and it doesn't and I no longer have to actually encrypt all the different things I send you because it's a channel Between the two of us, it's called a session and it's open.
Henry: Either open or it's closed.
Mike: It's open or it's closed. So, now I remember back in the early days of encryption having to encrypt a hard drive on my laptop and it was a small, hard drive, like two gigs. It took like a day, no seriously, it took a day because you had to literally scan every file and then verbal them all up and then reload them. Whereas with us, it's like, no let's not do that, Henry you and I trust each other. We've shared an encrypted key so because we don't want other people seeing our conversations and that's enough for the two of us to feel safe and secure to communicate.
Henry: Okay. So, with anyone it's like two neighbours beside each other and they just gave each other a key to their house because they trust each other.
Mike: Yeah, if all of a sudden you don't like your neighbour. Your neighbour gets up at six in the morning, every Saturday and mosses lawn, then you just get up one morning. When your neighbour goes to work on Monday, you go, you call the locksmith, the locksmith comes and changes the key to your house. That key that you gave your neighbour no longer works. It can no longer get into your house and it's all over done.
Henry: That's fantastic. So, that's inherent in anyone. You can choose who you want to commute with and if it no longer is beneficial for either one of you can stop it.
Mike: Moderate yourself, that's the wonderful thing about basing a private network and a private set of communications Henry on encryption keys because there's two sides to every key. There’re two locks, there's two keys. We both need to open them. So, by using that as the basis for the channels of communication, anybody can break it at any time and unlike all these other guys, I don't know your phone number, I don't know your email address. I don't know where you live because you don't have to share any of that with me, but we can talk and all of a sudden, if I start going crazy or you start going crazy, we break the key either of us can and it's all good. We've moderated ourselves. Life is good again.
Henry: Thank you very much, Mike. That was a quick one.
Mike: That was a quick one. Thank you, Henry.