nwrickert
sand groper
Premium,MVM
join:2004-09-04
Geneva, IL
 ·AT&T Midwest
| reply to pete853
Re: SSL, WIFI and Google apps question
Gmail sends me encrypted data and FireFox decrypts it. But how FireFox knows the decryption code? This depends on public key encryption. Firefox sees the certificate that google offers, and verifies it (I'll skip the details on that). That certificate contains a public key. Firefox generates a random encryption key, and sends that to google, encrypted with the public key from the certificate. Google, but nobody else (we hope) has the corresponding private key. So only google can decrypt that message containing your random key. Thereafter, the session switches to standard symmetric encryption using the key that firefox sent to google.
That's standard SSL, perhaps a bit over simplified.
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AT&T dsl; Westell 327w modem/router; SuSE 10.1; firefox 2.0.0.14 |
