A brilliant invention for privacy.

Our story begins with a teenager who is in love,

Ross is a very young boy. He loves science-fiction and Led Zeppelin. His friends don’t really understand him or at least he thinks so. He just likes to play with puzzles and solving crosswords.

One day, he discovered an old book desciribing a method for transporting any information to people secretly. He was very intruged. According to the book there were two concepts for a secure information exchange between two people. Encryption and decryption. Encryption was the process where you take a data, lets say “ROSSISTHEBOSS” then change it with a specific method, lets say the method is Replace S with R , so the encrypted data would be “SORRIRTHEBORR”. And then, when someone sends this data to someone else the method to decode the data must be told also, so in this case Replace R with S . He thought it was like the invisible ink which requires a special blue light to be visible.

As much as he likes what he was reading he noticed an insufficency about this transaction. When you were sending the puzzled message, you were also giving out the solution. Therefore it was actually the same thing as just sending the message itself. Anyone hijacked the message and the method would have read it. He didn’t like that so he kept reading with the hope of finding a magical solution to his burning desire of exchanging messages with maximum privacy. His search didn’t last long.

He discovered a perfect solution. As he was reading, he was amazed by the beautiful design of the method. According to the method, everybody should have two special numbers, one should be shared with public, like phone numbers, email addresses, bank account numbers and the other one should be kept private like passwords. But this was the least interesting part of this solution. What amazed him was the usage of these numbers, you could turn a message into a complete mess with the help of the shared public number of whom you want to send it to, and that person could use her/his private number and make that mess go away and see the message. In his understanding, with this method, somebody could prove that a message was sent from him and he could prepare a message that can be only be read by a specific person.

Ross liked this idea, he liked it a lot. In fact he wanted to test it ASAP. He was in love with Rachel for a long time and thought it would be a good opportunity to test this brilliant method while telling his feelings to Rach without the fear of somebody would know before her.

He decided to tell his feelings with a digital message. He used Python with Crypto module. He has two requirements;

1. Rachel must be the only one who can see it.

This is the basic benefit Public Key Encription for securely exchanging information between parties.

2. Rachel must be sure it is from Ross.

This is more advanced but the core benefit of Public Key Encription for proof of ownership which includes Digital Signatures concept.

Now Ross can relax and wait for Rachel’s reaction without fearing over his friends would find out and make fun of him unless Rachel would tell everybody herself. In that case, no cryptographic method could save him.