I learned about asymmetrical and symmetrical algorithms this weekend. It was quite interesting. The topics I covered included basic and digest authentication including hashing algorithms. I also did some reading about digital certificates and digital signatures. Those last two always confused me.

A particularly interesting topic was the Diffie Hellman algorithm which made sense to me for the first time in a long time. The idea behind it being able to generate a symmetrical key, which is a key that can decrypt cipher text and encrypt plaintext but here is the kicker: you can generate this key which both parties become aware of even though you’ve never met each other before. So you can generate a “shared” key and communicate that between parties over an insecure medium. Thats pretty amazing. You basically use asymmetric encryption(to generate the shared symmetrical key) to begin with, then you drop down in to using symmetrical encryption, and use the key for the remainder of the casual communication from that point onwards. Symmetrical encryption using symmetrical keys is which is faster and more efficient.  

Also learnt that about TLS – never quite knew that TLS is really just the name of the many version of SSL.

Apart from that, I watched the Accountant which left me feeling like a secret agent for the rest of the Sunday.