Before high speed, secure communication technology existed in the form of computers/phones, how could a government confidently engage with someone claiming to represent a foreign nation’s government? I just imagine you’d risk someone with the ability to forge documents and put on a good performance being able to declare war on behalf of an unsuspecting country.
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There’s a bunch who explained the historical solutions, but for the underlying academic problem: we do know it’s possible to communicate securely through insecure means. It’s actually *way* more important today than it ever was before “modern technology.” Notably, your computer/device can communicate securely with a remote server without needing to trust any of the tens-thousands of devices between you.
Now, the modern base standard example is the [Diffie-Hellman key exchange](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exchange), but that doesn’t mean it’s the only way. There are simpler implementations of the same general idea, both mathematically and technologically, but the idea is that you can exchange secrets through open means.
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