Announcing an advanced curricula for trainers on cure cryptographic concepts

The tools and practices of digital safety stands on top of a relatively small amount of core cryptographic concepts. Yet in training on these tools and practices, we treat the cryptography as magic that we just trust inherently, or provide an often convoluted metaphor to partially explain, and move on.

Of course, not everyone needs to understand how hashes are really working, or what an HTTPS connection, S/MIME, and a PGP key pair have in common.

But for those of us who shoulder the responsibility of training others on digital safety, however, it is critical we make an effort to more deeply understand these concepts, and understand where our knowledge thins out and stops, so that we can be honest with ourselves and those we support when we get complex questions.

We also do ourselves a disservice by presuming these concepts are inherently “hard.” Which is also not to imply this is easy – picking up a guide and working through it in a day or two will not prepare you to implement secure cryptographic algorithms (please don’t!).

However, exploring these concepts over the course of a few days will give you eternally useful insights into every technical aspect of digital safety. A baseline understanding of asymmetric RSA encryption gives deep insights into PGP key pairs, HTTPS connections, and even S/MIME encryption, as well as helping you evaluate new encryption tools. Understanding “entropy” opens the door to answering challenging questions about real-world password security. Understanding “hashes” not only supports how validation of media and downloads works, but also builds on how PGP signatures work, HTTPS certificates, and gives you a valuable tool for all sorts of uses.

Find lessons on Asymmetric encryption, entropy, and hashes in the new Fundamentals of Cryptography section.

Learning Goals

  • Reduce inaccurate understanding of critical security concepts
  • Introduce fundamental cryptographic concepts to digital safety trainers and interested learners
  • Enable better explanation of common topics in digital safety training beyond the curricula or metaphor used
  • Dispel the myth that any understanding of these concepts is impossible