[ale] OT: Diffie-Hellman key exchange for dummies?

[Pope jonnyX]

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On 8/4/2007 8:49 PM, List spaketh'd unto us thusly:

> I sort of hope somebody disagrees with me, but, the short answer to your
>  question is no, this really is black magic unless you want to learn some
>  of the basics of number theory and set theory which underly what is 
> going on here.

At one of the Atlanta Transhumanist meetings a few months before he and his
wife moved back to San Francisco, Dr. Merkle went over some tips for
understanding what exactly is going on when trying to work through the math
for this and other algorithms. One of them was to use the smallest numbers
you can get away with, although with primes you usually want "3" to be your
smallest. Failing that, wikipedia has links to some articles & walkthroughs
for non-mathematicians. Hope that helps.

- --jX

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