From the Beauty of Stockholm to the Beauty of RSA

I was so proud to give a talk at Crypto Club in the beautiful and enterprising city of Stockholm last week (thank you to Thales for the invite). In fact, the presentation was in the hotel that once hosted the hostage incident, that derived the term “Stockholm Syndrome”.

It is my second Crypto Club talk, after giving one in my equally beautiful home city (Edinburgh). A key message of the event is that the knowledge of encryption in the industry is very poor — both from executives and technical professionals— and that things need to change. One of my slides shows that the CEOs of Equifax and Talk Talk — when reporting their data breaches — had no idea if encryption was being used on their data:

So let’s dive in and do a bit of crypto and Python.

The method

There was the time before I understood RSA, and there was the time after it. For a method that has existed for over 40 years, it is still going strong. It is as beautiful in its maths as any work of art. As a teacher, I love it when a student finally sees the method, and its simplicity.