My Facebook messenger wants to end-to-encrypt my messages but I don’t know what that means. I tried googling but still don’t get it, I’m not that great with technology. Someone please eli5
In: Technology
Imagine Alice has a message she wants to send to Bob and she doesn’t want Charlie or David to see it. We’ll pretend like envelopes are impossible for anyone except the recipient to open (they’ll be like encryption in our example).
First lets start with the simplest example an unencrypted message. If she writes her message on a post card and hands it to Charlie to give to Bob Charlie can read it then pass it to David who can also read it and then hand it to Bob who reads it, too. Everyone got to read the unencrypted message.
Next she writes her message on a post card and hands it to Charlie who places the post card in an envelope and hands the envelope to David who then takes it to Bob. While the message was in an envelope and David couldn’t read it since Charlie put the post card in the envelope so he could still read the whole thing. This is partial encryption. It’s fine if Alice trusts Charlie with the message.
Finally, end to end encryption is like Alice putting the post card in her own envelope before leaving her home handing the envelope to Charlie who hands it to David and then to Bob, and Bob opens the envelope at his home and reads the message. Now only the intended recipient read the message because everyone else only had the impossible to open enveloped message.
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