The Internet: Encryption and public keys

(energetic music)

- Hi. My name is Mia Gil Epner.

I'm majoring in Computer
Science at UC Berkeley

and I work for the Department of Defense

where I try to keep information safe.

The internet is an open and public system.

We all send and receive information

over shared wires and connections.

Even though it's an open system,

we still exchange a lot of private data,

things like credit card numbers,

bank information, passwords, and emails.

So how is all this
private stuff kept secret?

Data of any kind can be kept secret

through a process known as encryption,

descrambling or changing of the message

to hide the original text.

Now, decryption is the process

of unscrambling that
message to make it readable.

This is a simple idea,

and people have been
doing it for centuries.

One of the first well-known
methods of encryption

was Caesar's cipher,
named after Julius Caesar,

a Roman general who encrypted
his military commands

to make sure that if a message
was intercepted by enemies,

they wouldn't be able to read it.

Caesar's cipher is an algorithm

that substitutes each letter
in the original message

with a letter a certain number
of steps down the alphabet.

If the number is something only the sender

and receiver know, then
it's called the key.

It allows the reader to
unlock the secret message.

For example, if your
original message is, "Hello",

then, using the Caesar's cipher algorithm

with a key of five, the
encrypted message would be this.

(typrwriter keys clacking)

(computer chime)

To decrypt the message, the recipient

would simply use the key
to reverse the process.

But there's a big problem
with Caesar's cipher.

Anybody can easily break or
crack the encrypted message

by trying every possible key.

In the English alphabet,
there are only 26 letters,

which means you'd only
need to try, at most,

26 keys to decrypt the message.

Now, trying 26 possible
keys isn't very hard.

It would take, at most, an hour to do.

So let's make it harder.

Instead of shifting every
letter by the same amount,

let's shift each letter
by a different amount.

In this example, a 10 digit key

shows how many positions
each successive letter

will be changed to
encrypt a longer message.

(typewriter keys clacking)

Guessing this key would be really hard.

Using 10 digit encryption,

there could be 10 billion
possible key solutions.

Obviously, that's more than
any human could ever solve.

It would take many centuries,
but an average computer today

would take just a few seconds

to try all 10 billion possibilities.

So in a modern world, where the bad guys

are armed with computers
instead of pencils,

how can you encrypt messages so securely

that they're too hard to crack?

Now, "too hard" means that
there are too many possibilities

to compute in a reasonable amount of time.

Today's secure communications

are encrypted using 256 bit keys.

That means a bad guy's computer

that intercepts your message,

would need to try this
many possible options

until they discover the
key and crack the message.

(robot bleeps and beeps)

(energetic music)

Even if you had a hundred
thousand super computers,

and each of them was able to try

a million billion keys every second,

it would take trillions
of trillions of trillions

of years to try every option,

just to crack a single message

protected with 256 bit encryption.

Of course, computer
chips get twice as fast,

then half the size every year or so.

If that pace of exponential
progress continues,

today's impossible
problems will be solvable

just a few hundred years in the future,

and 256 bits won't be enough to be safe.

In fact, we've already had to

increase the standard key length

to keep up with the speed of computers.

The good news is, using a longer key

doesn't make encrypting
messages much harder,

but it exponentially increases
the number of guesses

that it would to crack a cipher.

When the sender and the
receiver share the same key

to scramble and unscramble a message,

it's called symmetric encryption.

With symmetric encryption,
like Caesar's cipher,

the secret key has to be
agreed on ahead of time

by two people in private.

That's great for people,

but the internet is open and public,

so it's impossible for two computers

to meet in private to
agree on a secret key.

Instead, computers use asymmetric keys,

a public key that can be
exchanged with anybody

and a private key that is not shared.

The public key is used to encrypt data

and anybody can use it to
create a secret message,

but the secret can only be decrypted

by a computer with access
to the private key.

How it works is with some math

that we won't get into right now.

Think of it this way, imagine

that you have a personal mailbox

where anybody can deposit mail,

but they need a key to do it.

Now, you could make many copies

of the deposit key, and
send one to your friend

or even just make it publicly available.

Your friend, or even a stranger,

can use the public key

to access your deposit
slot and drop a message in,

but only you can open the
mailbox with your private key

to access all of the secret
messages you've received.

You can send a secure
message back to your friend

by using the public deposit
key to their mailbox.

This way, people can
exchange secure messages

without ever needing to
agree on a private key.

Public key cryptography is the foundation

of all secure messaging
on the open internet

including security protocols
known as SSL and TLS

which protect us when
we're browsing the web.

Your computer uses this today.

Any time you see the little lock

or the letters https in
your browser's address bar,

this means your computer is
using public key encryption

to exchange data securely
with the website you're on.

(energetic music)

As more and more people
get on the internet,

more and more private
data will be transmitted,

and the need to secure that data

will be even more important.

As computers become faster and faster,

we'll have to develop new ways

to make encryption too hard
for computers to break.

This is what I do with my
work, and it's always changing.

(energetic music)