Re: More on learning "Public Key Authentication"

Mark Conrad <NoSpamDammit@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I wish they would explain the practical benefits of PKA in the real
> world, or at least say that they learned PKA just for the mental
> challenge of learning it.

The practical benefit is that you never send your password over the net,
you actually never send anything that can by itself be used to unlock
anything, and you can use pretty hefty encoding to ensure that things
stay untampered with (such as with PGP). You just send something that
can only be un-encrypted by the person with the right private key, which
also does not have to be sent anywhere (in fact, absolutely shouldn't).
That is practical, and adds tons of security.

Now, whether you _need_ that security is another matter.
--
/Jon
Put "jaalborg" for "navn", remove ".invalid".
.