this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
96 points (92.1% liked)

Technology

59534 readers
3209 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
L3s@fry.gs
L4s@fry.gs
L4s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
96
what if the hacker provided the public key for https connection? (www.youtube.com)
submitted 6 months ago by Moxible@monyet.cc to c/technology@lemmy.world
43 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

So this video explains how https works. What I don't get is what if a hacker in the middle pretended to be the server and provided me with the box and the public key. wouldn't he be able to decrypt the message with his private key? I'm not a tech expert, but just curious and trying to learn.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] JakenVeina@lemm.ee 1 points 6 months ago

An additionap note on what a certificate is, to supplement everyone here who've desceibe howbthat's the missing piece:

A certificate's first main purpose is being the vehicle vy which the public key is distributed, but additionally it contains information ABOUT the owner. Then the whole thing is digitally signed with the private key (and also a trusted CA's private key), so that a receiver can validate the authenticity of the cert with the public key.

The "info" in the cert can theoretically be anything, but the most important one is the domain. Your browser knows that visiting google.com is secure because it checks the cert it gets from google.com to see if it states that it owns the google.com domain, and then we trust the root CAs around the world to make clients prove they own that domain, before issung a cert for it.