Simon Singh

speaker

239 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2013 last heard Jan 2015

Simon Singh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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More or Less · Numbers of the Year 2014. · 2 Jan 2015 podcast

So do you have a particular favourite?

I wrote a book about codes and code breaking.

And the most important cryptographic breakthrough of the millennium, the story was broken in Martin Gardner's column.

And it's this idea of public key cryptography.

So if I want to send you a secret message, I have to scramble it up according to some recipe.

And if you're going to unscramble it, you need to know that recipe.

And that just seems annoying because I've got to get that recipe to you secretly.

And if I could get the recipe to you secretly, then why don't I just use that route to send the message?

So this idea of exchanging the key, exchanging the recipe, held back encryption for centuries, for millennia.

But public key cryptography says that you can exchange a message with somebody you've never, ever met before...

without giving them any secret information, and they will be able to decode that message.

And Martin Gardner explained all of this and explained the mathematics, but maybe we'll avoid the mathematics and maybe use an analogy.

We could talk about, I've got a precious object instead of a secret message.

I put the precious object in a box and I lock it with a padlock and I send it to you.

Now, you can't open it because I've got the key.

And that's our key distribution problem.

That's our recipe distribution problem.

But what you do is you put your own padlock on the box and send it all the way back to me.

So I've now got a box with two padlocks, my padlock and your padlock.

I can undo my padlock because I've got the key.

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