Suppose Francis Crick and James D. Watson, through the magic of biotechnology, sat on a stage and talked about how they discovered the structure of DNA. Reports from this event were posted on YouTube. Or suppose Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, driven by a magical spark, start a discussion about the superiority of alternating current over direct current – and the madness begins. The page view counter after an hour showed millions, even more than at the premiere of Apple products.

Now let’s get to this year’s RSA Conference, perhaps the most important international cryptology event. The panel includes, among others, authors of discoveries that changed the course of history half a century ago. It has revolutionized the way we exchange information. This guarantees the security of not only state secrets, such as previously used cryptographic methods, but also our little secrets. They guarantee the privacy of data transmission, denoted by the abbreviations SSL or HTTP, and hide the contents of bitcoin wallets. Public key cryptography, since this is the invention we are talking about, transformed global civilization to a higher level.

Meanwhile, fewer than five hundred viewers, including the author, attempted to watch the recording of Whitfield Diffie and Clifford Cocks’ conversation on 7 June.

Perfect = impossible

There are many passwords. And among them, this one looks perfect at a glance. It is based on the use of a one-time key, which is a series of characters, preferably randomly generated, that are “added” to the string that creates the content. The sender of the message uses it to encode it, the recipient – to decode it (technical details are not important for understanding the principle). One-time key encryption has great advantages over techniques that replace characters in a message with other characters based on certain strict rules.

Original text title: “The Key to Everything”