Intuiting TLS

How do you speak privately in a public setting? Think about it. The internet’s age-old problem; Anyone between you and the websites you visit can see (and even edit) all back-and-forth communication. Can you prevent the router at starbucks from seeing your login password? This is what stuff like Transport Layer Security (TLS, formerly SSL) attempts to solve. But going back a bit: how would you do it? Encryption Well, the simplest answer is to speak in a code (cipher) known only to you and the website, where one side scrambles the message (encryption) and the other unscrambles it (decryption). A good start, but it’s problematic; First, the cipher has to be relatively complex or people will figure it out (“use one letter over” becomes painfully obvious after a while). Second, every website can’t have the same cipher.. It would no longer be secret. OK, new plan; Generate the cipher randomly and uniquely for each website. We have a Random Number Generator (RNG) construct that can be c ... Read full article.