Encryption is the process of taking a message
and scrambling it's contents so that only certain people can look at your message. There are two types of encryption: symmetric
and asymmetric encryption. Let's first take a look at symmetric encryption
to understand why asymmetric encryption was created. To do that, let me introduce you to Alice
and Bob. Alice has a sensitive document that she wants
to share with Bob. She uses an encryption program to protect
her document with a password or passphrase that she chooses. She then sends the encrypted document to Bob. However, Bob cannot open this message because
he doesn't know the passphrase that Alice used to encrypt the document. In other words: he doesn't have the key to
open the lock. Now comes a real problem: how does Alice share
this passphrase securely with Bob? Sending it through email is risky because
others might find the passphrase and use it to decrypt any messages between Alice and
Bob.
This is exactly the kind of problem that asymmetric
encryption intends to solve. It's compareable to a mailbox on the street. The mailbox is exposed to anyone who knows
its location. We can say that the location of the mailbox
is completely public. Anyone who knows the address can go to the
mailbox and drop in a letter. However, only the owner of the mailbox has
a key to open it up and read the messages. Let's go back to technical details. When using asymmetric encryption, both Alice
and Bob have to generate a keypair on their computers. A popular and secure way for doing this is
by using the RSA algorithm. This algorithm will generate a public and
private key that are mathematically linked to each other. Public keys can be used to encrypt data and
only the matching private key can be used to decrypt it. Even though the keys are linked together they
cannot be derrived from each other. In other words: if you know someone's public
key, you cannot derrive his private key.
If we retake our mailbox example then the
mailbox's address would be the public key something that everyone is allowed to know. The owner of the mailbox is the only one who
has the private key and that is needed to open up the mailbox. Let's now take a look at how Alice and Bob
can use asymmetric encryption to communicate securely with each other. They start by exchanging their public keys. Bob gives his public key to Alice and Alice
gives her public key to Bob. Now Alice can send her sensitive document
again. She takes the document and encrypts it with
Bob's public key. She then sends the file to Bob, who uses his
private key to unlock the document and read it. Because they use asymmetric encryption, only
Bob is able to decrypt the message. Not even Alice can decrypt it because she
doesn't have Bob's private key. The strength and security of the asymmetric
encryption now relies on Alice and Bob to keep their private keys well protected. If an attacker steals Alice's private key,
it can be used to decrypt all messages that are intended for Alice. However, the attacker cannot decrypt messages
that where sent by Alice because that requires Bob's private key.
Asymmetric encryption is used in a lot of
places where security really matters. You might not be aware of it, but everytime
you visit a secure website via HTTPS, you're actually using asymmetric encryption. It's also being used to securily send emails
with the PGP protocol. And one last example: Bitcoin also uses asymmetric
encryption to make sure that only the owner of a money wallet can withdraw or transfer
money from it. So now you know how asymmetric encryption
works and what the differences are between asymmetric and symetric encryption. If you liked this video, consider supporting
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for watching!
