The Last Key!

Hope you guys have watched the trailer, The Last key.  If not I dare you to watch it.

Okay, joke aside, this blog post is about cryptography and public keybase keybase.io.

Crypto-What?

So these days when cyber crime, identity theft as common as bug in your code, people are getting insecure with their internet transactions, chat over various media and the threat of being spied remains the same.  This threat leads some security enthusiast to find a way for a secure transactions over internet and we call this field as Cryptography.

Cryptography is the study to find secure methods to transact securely between two parties which may or may not be on internet.  Cryptography is as old as human politics :p

Kings of different nations need to transmit messages securely so that the message do not get tampered or leaked by any medium in between and to overcome this threat they use various methods which in today's modern world known as "algorithms".

Encryption

Encryption is nothing but the process of encoding message into a form of jargon which can only be understood if you have appropriate key.  It is more like, you can only read the contents of a locked diary unless you have the key to unlock it.

More resources on encryption are provided here.

Why encrypt?

Why encypt?...

Like anyone you might not like when someone peeks at your life without your consent.  Say, how would you react if someone reads your personal diaries without your consent? I guess, you would be infuriated, right?

Now, how helpful it would be if anyone tries to read your diary but can't understand what is written because of the bad writing you have :p
Or say if you have written the diary in mirrored language just like DaVinci.

This is what is called encryption and everyone needs it unless you know a language nobody understands other than you :p.

What is Public Key and Private key?

Keys, like any general key are nothing but a way to unlock the path to your secrets.  In cryptography, keys are the codes required to decode the encrypted secrets we all try to hide from others. So, whatever happens to you, never loose your key or you will be locked out of your own secrets.

In Cryptography, there are two types of keys, public key and private key.  Anyone with encrypted message for your public key can't access the message unless he have your both the keys, public and private one.

Since public keys are meant to be published publicly and distributed to all, you should never disclose your private with anyone and carefully protect your private keys with a strong password, maybe diceware one :D

So, how to publish your public key to all, here are two ways:
1. Mail to them your public key so that they can understand your jargon.
2. Publish your public key on the key base like keybase.io.

To understand the public key cryptography, watch the following video, it will sure help you :)

Keybase

Keybase is a PGP key directory that maps social media identities to encryption keys in a publicly auditable manner. It provides various utilities like, chatting with someone else using pgp encryption.

It is another method to publicly publish your public key so that only trusted people can transact with you over internet.

 

 So, follow me on keybase to understand my jargon messages.


Note: Whenever I says transact, it can be any kind of transaction like money transfer, chatting, information exchange and so on.

Till then,

To infinity and Beyond!