Where does this come from, and can I check it?

The 1976 Diffie-Hellman method lets both sides derive the same number without ever sending it. The figure is taken from IETF, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.

Is this really a technology fact?

Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.

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The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.

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Two strangers agreed a secret key in public

The 1976 Diffie-Hellman method lets both sides derive the same number without ever sending it Each side picks a private number and sends the result of a one way calculation with a shared public value. Combining your private number with the other side's public result gives the same shared secret on both ends, and an eavesdropper cannot work it back without solving a discrete logarithm. The idea underpins the opening of most encrypted web sessions. It sits in Mondo's technology collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.

Where this comes from

IETF

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RSA made public key encryption practicalRivest, Shamir and Adleman built a system in 1977 whose security rests on the difficulty of factoring large numbers A one time pad cannot be broken by analysisClaude Shannon proved in 1949 that a random key used once gives a ciphertext compatible with every possible message AES replaced a twenty five year old cipherNIST chose the Rijndael design in 2000 after a public competition, and it became the federal standard in 2001 Colossus was the world's first programmable electronic digital computerTommy Flowers built Colossus at Bletchley Park in 1943 to break Lorenz cipher messages Hamming codes find and fix a single bad bitRichard Hamming's 1950 scheme adds overlapping parity bits so a receiver can locate one flipped bit and repair it Reed-Solomon codes keep scratched discs playableIrving Reed and Gustave Solomon published the maths in 1960, and it now protects CDs, QR codes and deep space links

Tags: encryption, key-exchange, cryptography

Two strangers agreed a secret key in public: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?: The 1976 Diffie-Hellman method lets both sides derive the same number without ever sending it. The figure is taken from IETF, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a technology fact?: Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
What else can I read about it?: The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.