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by mikefallen 1871 days ago
The math behind DH is pretty simple and really interesting.
1 comments

Yes. Though having heard of modulo arithmetic before helps a lot. So eg simple enough for your typical HN crowd.

There's also an interesting public key encryption system you can build on top of DH called ElGamal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElGamal_encryption

What makes ElGamal so interesting, is that it's probabilistic and that you can easily prove its semantic security (from relatively straightforward assumptions), and more importantly 'indistinguishability under Chosen Plaintext Attack' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciphertext_indistinguishabilit...)

Ie even if the attacker can guess your plaintext and knows the public key, they can't be sure that they guessed right.