Ask HN: Interesting topics for an intro InfoSec / cryptography lecture?

11 points

9 years ago

I'm going to hold a half hour presentation about information security and cryptography for a mostly non-programmer audience in a couple of weeks. They are however all master students in engineering, just not in CS. The purpose of the presentation is mostly to provide some insight in how stuff actually works, but still in a comprehensible and hopefully interesting and even fun fashion.

I remember when I first learnt about Diffie–Hellman key exchange and RSA, and how cool I thought it was. So I'm thinking about going trough an example using color mixing as the secure one way function (something like this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEBfamv-_do).

Other topics I'm thinking of including is how the CA-system works, in contrast to a web of trust. Maybe also proof-of-work based blockchains or Samir's Secret Sharing algorithm.

Do you know of something cool I could share?

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