How to Talk about Cryptography to Everyone with Debbie Ly

developer relations at lit protocol and today I'm going to talk to you all about how to explain cryptography to everyone so we're going to start from a very base level understanding cryptography moving up to our current wallet architecture and to start off the day we're going to start off with some games and pattern recognition so for this I want you all to kind of sit and think of like what this pattern is and what the next word says so here we go I'm going to give you a few seconds and there's a hint on the bottom if you are unsure so who who thinks they know what this is yeah Moon so this pattern here is um uh reverse okay okay y'all are good okay next we have this next pattern okay Gabe what what is it yeah yeah you got it um so this next pattern is that letter shift so if any of y'all have ever done um as a kid I would do these games with friends and do Pig Latin and kind of move words around and create my our own language so this pattern is at letter shift where that age is moved to the end the first letter for w world is moved to the end as well being able to create this um yeah different language in a way okay this is more numbers based what do y'all think this pattern is I'm gonna I'm gonna wait for a second I'm gonna let someone else answer Okay so increasing by the odd number um not quite you in the front here yep absolutely you got it so this pattern is the um square of the number so we have one two three four squared and so when we I'm going to go into how this relates to cryptography in the next few slides but I'm going to first explain like what is cryptography so cryptography or a set of communication techniques that allow only the sender intended recipient of a of a message to view its content so the term is derived from the Greek word kryptos which means you know hidden obfuscated and it's used in many applications today and for these games we can think of them as very very simple cryptography cryptographic like patterns the algorithms underlying without keys which we'll talk about a bit more and so like why is cryptography important um how many people here care about keeping your address private um how many people care about keeping your banking information private so without cryptography are the the set of data would be at risk and put like a lot of people who are not and you won't don't intend to have your information might be able to see that so we need cryptography to be able to encrypt that information as well as set access to who is allowed to see that so there are some core ethos around cryptography um mainly around data privacy data authenticity and data Integrity so um in these subcategories confidentiality so only the sender intended recipient of a message can view its contents the data is where it claims to be so the message senders who they claim to be as well as accuracy and consistency so the message received is the same as the message that was sent and so how does how does cryptography work where you have we have the encryption and decryption side and the key parts are the key and this encryption decryption algorithm so encryption here is the process of transforming plain text into ciphertext um using a specific algorithm and key um an algorithm takes that plain text and manipulates it based on an algorithm to produce ciphertext that is readable and meaningless without your key for decryption it's a process of transforming ciphertext back into plain text and it allows the authorized recipient of the encrypted message to access that original plain text message and so keys are incredibly important in this scenario because keys are used to encrypt and decrypt messages they're used to authenticate and authorize access to sensitive information so an encryption key is a variable value that is applied using an algorithm to a string or block of text is used to produce encrypted text and decrypt in encrypted information so in the in this case like of some of the games that we've played earlier that algorithm would be those patterns and that key is what's unique to an individual so let's say we're using that square pattern or we're using that reverse pattern that's very very easy to decrypt we can kind of decrypt that in person whereas you want to make that harder so you have a key that's unique to be able to make that information kind of held by you and then you can kind of give someone else like your key to be able to say hey this is a pattern and this is my key you can use this key to decrypt that um let's see and then I'm going to talk a little bit about keys keys are important for authentication and access control so in these scenarios keys are used to verify that our message or request is coming from a trusted source so in the example a web 2 example is like a secure online transaction a digital certificate may be used to verify that our website being accessed is legitimate and that the user's data is being transmitted securely and the certificate might contain a public key that can be used to encrypt information on the website as well as a private key and certain instances to decrypt that information so we're all here in um to learn more about web3 and so every crypto wallet has a public key and a private key pair and so a public key allows you to receive cryptography transactions it's cryptographic code that's paired to a private key and the public key can receive transactions using an address which is usually a form of your public key or sorry yeah the your address can receive a transaction using that public key and while anyone can send transactions with using the public key you need a private key to unlock and prove that you're the owner of that cryptocurrency transaction while you can generate a public key with a private key doing the opposite is theoretically impossible and so in this current case if you've ever heard of the phrase like not your keys not your crypto there's a lot of importance around keeping that private key secure and what I work on at lit protocol is actually decentralizing Key Management so being able to not you don't need to you being able to have different recovery methods for your key being able to have a key a private key distributed across a network where you might not really need to even hold that full key and save your seed phrase or save that elsewhere so there's a big future in Key Management in web3 and um I hope you'll join so thank you so much if you have any questions I'll be around