This entry was posted on February 26, 2012 at 8:26 pm and is filed under Video / Theatre with tags diffie-hellman key exchange, discrete logarithm, modular arithmetic, public key cryptography, simon singh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


March 1, 2012 at 8:35 pm
Hello Brit,
I enjoyed your Public Key Cryptography video; the color-mix metaphor is a great one I have not heard before. I write to provide feedback on one element of the explanation that I felt was unclear. At roughly 4’30”, the script reads: “Alice takes Bob’s public result (16) and raises it to the power of her private number (54), which gives 3 to the power of 54 x 24”. Except one quickly realizes that 16^54 does not give 3^(54*24). While it is true that 16^54 mod 17 is congruent to 3^(54*24) mod 17 (the ultimate desired result), I found the wording of the script at this point of the explanation to be confusing. I suspect there is a clearer way of illuminating this key aspect of the process, though I humbly confess I do not have one to offer.
Thank you for your inspired effort, and keep up the excellent work.
~Alan
March 2, 2012 at 3:06 am
Thank you very much for your feedback Alan, I appreciate it! I will take this into consideration when putting together the final chapter
April 13, 2012 at 11:32 am
Thanks for this video. Like other modern technologies, most people use this stuff every day with no idea how it works (on no appreciation of the internal beautry)