Thank Fermat For Your Online Security

You might not know it, but Pierre de Fermat — a lawyer and mathematician — created a little theorem that makes sure that the Web site that you connect to is the right one. With this, when you connect to a Web site, the site provides its public key and signs a message with the associated private key. Your browser will then check the signature against the public key, ad if it checks out, you will be allowed to connect to the…