I’ve been trying to get my head around this and I’ve watched a few videos but they don’t seem to specifically answer my question.
According to what I’ve found online, messages encrypted with a public key can only be decrypted with a private key. But in practice, how is that possible?
Surely a public key contains a set of instructions, and anyone could just run those instructions in reverse to decrypt a message? If everything you need to encrypt a message is stored within a public key, then how is it a one-way process?
It’s likely that I’m misunderstanding a core element of this!
Ah, that is a really good question. These things happen. People have entire harddisks filled with “rainbow tables” which do these kind of attacks against hash-functions which are supposed to be one-way functions. This way they have terabytes worth of pre-computed hashes for the most common passwords and can immediately tell if one of those passwords is in a database leak.
For this it needs additional measures. Passwords are augmented with additional random data so people can’t pre-compute the hashes. So it wouldn’t be just ‘Hello’, but ‘Hello’ plus an additional (random) “salt” that gets fed into the one-way function so it can’t be brute forced.
PGP for example uses both symmetric cryptography and asymmetric cryptography. The actual message is encrypted with symmetric encryption and the key to that is encrypted with asymmetric encryption. Unfortunately it’s been a while since I last read a book on cryptography. I think they did that because symmetric cryptography is way faster. But things like that could also prevent such attacks. If you use the asymmetric encryption just for decrypting the other randomly chosen key which encrypts the actual message… There is no way to guess that. You’d have to check not just a small dictionary or know the plaintext, but check every random number in existence.
It’s not always obvious to the layman what kinds of attacks are possible with the crypto algorithms. They definitely need to protect against such scenarios or they’re worthless for that kind of use. There are “known plaintext attacks”. Usually people don’t want anyone even able to prove that you sent a certain message. And an algorithm also isn’t good if you can learn something about the secret key if you have access to both a ciphertext and plaintext (the other variables in the equation). I think this was part of how they cracked the supposedly secure enigma machines of the Nazis. A proper modern cryptography algorithm protects against any of that. Sometimes by combining several things.
Edit: Sure and I forgot padding which @mumblerfish said. And appending data additionally helps if you don’t want someone to know the exact length of a message. Or an algorithm sometimes can’t encrypt arbitrary amounts of plaintext but does it in fixed block lengths…
Ah thanks for the useful links! Those articles are all quite fascinating. In the plaintext attacks article, I love the tactic mentioned here:
Both cryptography and that part of history are fascinating topics. I can also recommend watching “The Imitation Game” with Benedict Cumberbatch starring as Alan Turing… I mean it’s just a movie and skips lots of the interesting stuff and details. YMMV.
It’s the beginning of computers. And I think especially that time has some interesting stories, discoveries/inventions and personas. There is also the history and role of women in computing which I think is something more people should know about and it’s related to that. After that we needed secrecy in the cold war. I think public key cryptography hasn’t been around until the 1970s. There had been export regulations on cryptography until after I was born. And modern encryption algorithms like AES are from the 1990s. Nowadays everyone and their grandma relies on the availability of secure communications.
I think I spent some nights jumping from Wikipedia article to Wikipedia article and reading all of that.