My goto for roughly explaining is bringing it back to xor & hash functions & RNGs: goal is to get a long enough random number to xor with your cleartext. Block cipher stretches entropy by repeated hashing. Stream cipher by seeding a RNG.
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I think it’s also worth elaborating on your point that “we all use symmetric crypto”. Like, I think that most people would be surprised to learn that TLS only uses asymmetric crypto for authn, and that encryption is done with a negotiated symmetric key.
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yesssss
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What can we do to make it less baffling?
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Well, now, you have to talk about the value of IVs, padding and stream vs block chaining. Is it safe to skip why inventing your own symmetric crypto scheme is a bad idea, and more so DES and 3DES? I’ve seen soo many custom ‘secure’ crypto schemes in the wild.
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Consider discussing 3 or 4 "red team" type points, such as why keys have to be rotated in communications, why just simply encrypting large amounts of stored data with a single symmetric key is vulnerable, why an attacker will look for weaknesses in key handling etc first, etc
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Oh, and part of why it's baffling is I can't ever get the precise definition of the mathematical notation used to describe the cryptography itself straight in my head. I can't translate that notation to badly written code, nor translate code back to that notation.
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It'd be nice to cover symmetric vs asymmetric.
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How can I "average human" use cryptography i.e. are there user tools that let me protect myself without a degree to understand it.
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How about a post on /r/aws? :-)
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