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

[Jay Loden]

List wrote:
> Jay,
> 
> 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.  In general terms, why it works is related to some of the 
> magic of prime numbers, and some very clever computational insights that 
> Diffie, Hellman, and (independently) Merkle figured out.  The secret 
> sauce is that it is really easy to multiply two prime numbers together 
> and get an answer, but it is very difficult to take the answer and 
> figure out what the two prime numbers were.  Beyond that the math gets 
> pretty deep pretty fast.
> 
> One of the inventors (Martin Hellman) wrote a very readable piece about 
> the technology for the IEEE 30 years ago called "An Overview of Public 
> Key Cryptography" which is available here: 
> http://www.comsoc.org/livepubs/ci1/public/anniv/pdfs/hellman.pdf
> 
> Tom

Thanks Tom, I'll take a look at that PDF. I kept researching and found this doc:
http://www.securitydocs.com/library/2978 which explains the concepts minus the
math pretty well. I guess I was more just curious about the 'black magic' part.
I'm sure there's a really good explanation, but the margins of this document are
too small to contain it ;)

Ah, one more reason on my very long list of why I need to go back and learn all
the math I got away with not learning in high school and college...

-Jay