Hacker News Reader

Comment by dublinben | Hacker News Reader

I met Bruce this last weekend at a conference, and every single business card I collected had the individual's PGP key on it.

View on HN

Well, I'm a professional security researcher, and I end up using ZIP+AES more often than I do PGP.

How do you securely share the AES key?

AES is really great compared to RSA, so I put my AES key on my website instead of my RSA public key. It's made it very easy for people to contact me securely.

AES is symmetric...

Yeah, that makes it really convenient for me if I have to decrypt an important message from a public computer.

exactly... I am just as confused as you are. What's the point of using AES if you are putting its key out on the open? O_O that's like using a very sophisticated lock on your front door and put up a sign saying "The key is under the Mat"

I believe the person was joking.

Is it really secure if everyone has the key?

No, it isn't. He/She is trying to be funny.

One of the saddest things about Snowden/Manning/NSA/etc. is that sarcasm and irony are no longer really safe to use in anything even vaguely related. Must really hurt The Onion.

Exactly, the same thing i am wondering. AES is symmetric. So same key is used for encryption and decryption against RSA which is asymmetric. So putting key on website is effectively the same as not encrypting at all. Did i miss any thing here?

just the humor

the trick with humor outside your main field is detecting it. I was like: "isn't AES a symmetric stuff ?" for a few second.

the other trick is naming thing: why would such a vague name like "Advanced Encryption Standard" designate specifically symmetric cipher?

The phone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com