[Cryptography] Explaining PK to grandma

[James A. Donald]

On 2013-11-28 07:39, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> The NSA can't compromise every endpoint without being noticed.

For defending against NSA, we don't really have to prevent active 
attacks.  We merely have to make it reasonably feasible for the 
seriously sophisticated paranoid to have a chance of detecting active 
attacks.

If very powerful adversary gets observed observing, it loses, since the 
information is valuable to its adversaries.

The guy in Nigeria, on the other hand, will have no hesitation in 
committing active attacks and will not much worry even if a very large 
proportion of them get detected.