[veritgo]

That's a little harsh.

If he understands how PKI works. If he understands that people share a public key which is in turn paired with a private key. And if he understands that said private key is the only key capable of decrypting messages that were encrypted using the public key, that should be fine.

If he knew that much, he'd probably be able to reason out what 'symmetric' vs 'asymmetric' meant, if given enough time.

Is knowing the exact terms better? Yes.

Is it shameful to understand the concept pretty well without knowing every bit of terminology used to describe it? I'd say no.