Little Brother

physically meet with the people in the web at least once, just to get started.

 > I get it sure. That’s not bad. But how you going to get everyone together for the key-signing?
> That’s what I wanted to ask you about — how can we do it without getting busted?

Jolu typed some words and erased them, typed more and erased them.

 > Darryl would know

I typed.

 > God, this was the stuff he was great at.

Jolu didn’t type anything. Then,

> How about a party?

he typed.

 > How about if we all get together somewhere like we’re teenagers having a party and that way we’ll have a ready-made excuse if anyone shows up asking us what we’re doing there?
> That would totally work! You’re a genius, Jolu.
> I know it. And you’re going to love this: I know just where to do it, too
> Where?
> Sutro baths!

Chapter 10

This chapter is dedicated to Anderson’s Bookshops, Chicago’s legendary kids’ bookstore. Anderson’s is an old, old family-run business, which started out as an old-timey drug-store selling some books on the side. Today, it’s a booming, multi-location kids’ book empire, with some incredibly innovative bookselling practices that get books and kids together in really exciting ways. The best of these is the store’s mobile book-fairs, in which they ship huge, rolling bookcases, already stocked with excellent kids’ books, direct to schools on trucks — voila, instant book-fair!

Anderson’s Bookshops: 123 West Jefferson, Naperville, IL 60540 USA +1 630 355 2665

What would you do if you found out you had a spy in your midst? You could denounce him, put him up against the wall and take him out. But then you might end up with another spy in your midst, and the new spy would be more careful than the last one and maybe not get caught quite so readily.

Here’s a better idea: start intercepting the spy’s communications and feed him and his masters misinformation. Say his masters instruct him to gather information on your movements. Let him follow you around and take all the notes he wants, but steam open the envelopes that he sends back to HQ and replace his account of your movements with a fictitious one. If you want, you can make him seem erratic and unreliable so they get rid of him. You can manufacture crises that might make one side or the other reveal the identities of other spies. In short, you own them.

This is called the man-in-the-middle attack and if you think about it, it’s pretty scary. Someone who man-in- the-middles your communications can trick you in any of a thousand ways.

Of course, there’s a great way to get around the man-in-the-middle attack: use crypto. With crypto, it doesn’t matter if the enemy can see your messages, because he can’t decipher them, change them, and re-send them. That’s one of the main reasons to use crypto.

But remember: for crypto to work, you need to have keys for the people you want to talk to. You and your partner need to share a secret or two, some keys that you can use to encrypt and decrypt your messages so that men-in-the-middle get locked out.

That’s where the idea of public keys comes in. This is a little hairy, but it’s so unbelievably elegant too.

In public key crypto, each user gets two keys. They’re long strings of mathematical gibberish, and they have an almost magic property. Whatever you scramble with one key, the other will unlock, and vice-versa. What’s more, they’re the only keys that can do this — if you can unscramble a message with one key, you know it was scrambled with the other (and vice-versa).

So you take either one of these keys (it doesn’t matter which one) and you just publish it. You make it a total non-secret. You want anyone in the world to know what it is. For obvious reasons, they call this your “public key.”

The other key, you hide in the darkest reaches of your mind. You protect it with your life. You never let anyone ever know what it is. That’s called your “private key.” (Duh.)

Now say you’re a spy and you want to talk with your bosses. Their public key is known by everyone. Your public key is known by everyone. No one knows your private key but you. No one knows their private key but them.

You want to send them a message. First, you encrypt it with your private key. You could just send that message along, and it would work pretty well, since they would know when the message arrived that it came from you. How? Because if they can decrypt it with your public key, it can only have been encrypted with your private key. This is the equivalent of putting your seal or signature on the bottom of a message. It says, “I wrote this, and no one else. No one could have tampered with it or changed it.”

Unfortunately, this won’t actually keep your message a secret. That’s because your public key is really well known (it has to be, or you’ll be limited to sending messages to those few people who have your public key). Anyone who intercepts the message can read it. They can’t change it and make it seem like it came from you, but if you don’t want people to know what you’re saying, you need a better solution.

So instead of just encrypting the message with your private key, you also encrypt it with your boss’s public key. Now it’s been locked twice. The first lock — the boss’s public key — only comes off when combined with your boss’s private key. The second lock — your private key — only comes off with your public key. When your bosses receive the message, they unlock it with both keys and now they know for sure that: a) you wrote it and b) only they can read it.

It’s very cool. The day I discovered it, Darryl and I immediately exchanged keys and spent months cackling and rubbing our hands as we exchanged our military-grade secret messages about where to meet after school and whether Van would ever notice him.

But if you want to understand security, you need to consider the most paranoid possibilities. Like, what if I tricked you into thinking that my public key was your boss’s public key? You’d encrypt the message with your private key and my public key. I’d decrypt it, read it, re-encrypt it with your boss’s real public key and send it on. As far as your boss knows, no one but you could have written the message and no one but him could have read it.