102: My Chief Goon

60 Seconds of WIP · Sep 24, 2025 · 1m

I’m at EuroBSDCon in Croatia teaching TLS and SMTP, so here’s a snippet from my TLS tutorial.

Let’s say I create a public key pair. I keep one key of the pair. The other key I give to my chief goon, Vizzini, before I dispatch him out into the world. Nobody else has either of these keys. My goon and I can use these keys to exchange messages that can be read only with the other key in the pair. I use my half to encrypt my messages to my goon. Hopefully I remember what I said, because once the message is encrypted, my key cannot decrypt my message. Fortunately, “Start a war and frame Guilder for…