I plan to devote a nice chunk of time to explaining how keys work (at least 5 minutes, maybe 10 which is a lot in a one hour talk!) in my WSE2 security presentation. Watching some different explanations that are given by people who *really* understand this stuff makes me laugh (mostly at my own dopiness) because I have no idea how someone who has never done encryption before could follow what they are talking about. This is not a criticism of the explanations I am seeing, I just know that if I am still going “but what about ____” and “wait, let’s do that again…” (ummm, more than once…gulp), that my intended audience of WSE2 Security for Dummies is going to feel the same way. That’s why I have chosen to present on this topic. I want to translate. I speak dummy. I wake up a dummy every morning. Every time I try to grok something I haven’t worked with before, I am totally a dummy. And I’m sick of making leaps of faith with concepts I don’t truly understand, so I’m willing to do the work to learn it.
Understand, this word “dummy“ has always been used as a term of endearment in my family. And I’m using it here in the sense of “the more you know, the less you know.”
I don’t plan to “dumb down“ or water down the concepts. I just want to approach them from a different angle.
