I’ve done research and I’m not sure if got the idea correctly. Is SSH used to remotely access the computers with encryption? Is it like how TeamViewer (connecting a remote computer) works?
In: Technology
Diffie-Helman explained in grade school terms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exchange#/media/File:DiffieHellman.png
All VPNs, SSL, TLS, secure tunnels, encrypted remote access, credit-card processing, websites; any application that depends on secure transmission over an insecure channel uses this method.
> The process begins by having the two parties, Alice and Bob, publicly agree on an arbitrary starting color that does not need to be kept secret. In this example, the color is yellow. Each person also selects a secret color that they keep to themselves – in this case, red and cyan. The crucial part of the process is that Alice and Bob each mix their own secret color together with their mutually shared color, resulting in orange-tan and light-blue mixtures respectively, and then publicly exchange the two mixed colors. Finally, each of them mixes the color they received from the partner with their own private color. The result is a final color mixture (yellow-brown in this case) that is identical to their partner’s final color mixture.
>If a third party listened to the exchange, they would only know the common color (yellow) and the first mixed colors (orange-tan and light-blue), but it would be very hard for them to find out the final secret color (yellow-brown). Bringing the analogy back to a real-life exchange using large numbers rather than colors, this determination is computationally expensive. It is impossible to compute in a practical amount of time even for modern supercomputers.
Now, the catch is, what if someone came up with a really good way of separating the “color mixtures”. We are afraid that this is about to be a technical reality. You see, these things called quantum computers offer unique ways of breaking Diffie-Helman. This risk is called quantum supremacy. It means that even if you use a secure channel, in the near future, a middleman with enough funding will be able to read it anyway. In theory, the industry is preparing the best practice to guard access to quantum computers, like with nuclear weapons. But in reality, commercial companies are going to start selling quantum computing API services. In this juncture, we may need to really pull back on how connected everything is, because foreign nation-states will be hacking everything.
Researchers are still working on finding math solutions; better ways of solving the man in the middle problem. Maybe when you grow up you will solve this problem!
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