Understanding Encryption
Anyone in the infosec industry for 5 minutes has had a training lecture on encryption. The vast majority have walked away scratching their head. Encryption seems like a seriously complicated subject, and it is, but only if you are building a new algorithm. The types and understanding are not. They just haven't been presented properly. You have heard of symmetric encryption, asymmetric encryption, and hashing. But what are they under the hood, and where do you use each of them? You will leave this presentation absolutely understanding all three, as well as non-repudiation. We will go through where each is used, and when and how they all get used together. Encryption is everywhere. We need to understand what is happening and be able to explain it. As an added bonus, we will actually be doing the math behind the Diffie-Hellman key exchange BY HAND, just to show that it is not a scary and mysterious as people think. Given that you perform the Diffie-Hellman key exchange many times every day, it is a good idea to understand it and know where it is happening.
