this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2024
32 points (79.6% liked)

Security

5005 readers
1 users here now

Confidentiality Integrity Availability

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
 

There’s a server, a client, and a hacker in a network. For encryption, the client and the server need to share their private keys. Wouldn’t the hacker be able to grab those during their transmission and decrypt further messages as they please?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

The actual math is way beyond me, but the algorithm is "one way" - it exploits the fact that given two prime numbers (ie, the private key) it is trivial to multiply them together, but if you only know the result (ie, the public key) it is computationally very expensive to determine the original prime factors. If you pick big enough numbers, it becomes effectively impossible to undo the multiplication