Cryptography

This comic sparked this post today, once again from KXCD.

Here’s the explanation that won me nerd points on the fora for the comic I found on Wikipedia.

The PGP cryptosystem includes a variant of the TTP in the form of the web of trust. PGP users digitally sign each others’ identity certificates and are instructed to do so only if they are confident the person and the public key belong together. A key signing party is one way of combining a get-together with some certificate signing. Nonetheless, doubt and caution remain sensible as some users have been careless in signing others’ certificates.

Current 128bit encryption standard would take as much energy to crack as 8 Nuculear Power Plants generate in 100 years, and up to 10¹³ years to compute. (Reference.)

Hope that’s interesting to some people.

Happy New Year.
Matt