Boost R&D Efficiency with Digital Signature Legitimacy in Canada

How to eSign a document: digital signature legitimacy for R&D in Canada

all right I just did this whole video my microphone wasn't plugged in so yeah so we're gonna talk about a lot of interesting things here so interesting that you should probably just hit subscribe right now so we're gonna be talking about digital signatures let's get started Pluralsight it's one of the first learning platforms I used as a software developer you can get a completely free trial and start learning by following a path on pretty much anything the learning paths combine numerous courses giving you the step-by-step path to reach your goals or you can find individual courses on pretty much anything maybe you want a class on cryptography security Python programming networking maybe Java you name it and they probably have it I can genuinely say that Pluralsight helped me advance my skills and my career I'll leave a referral link in the description go check it out so this kind of scoops together all of the information we've talked about in my cryptography crash course or micro series or whatever you want to call it and it's related to this and it uses a lot of these principles but it's not exactly the same thing so we've talked about cryptography now we're talking about digital signatures which is a little bit different than cryptography but uses a lot of the same concepts and works in a similar way it's different in its purpose what we're gonna be talking about in this video is how to verify if a message came from the intended sender or if the the message has been tampered with that is different than cryptography which is to make a message secret in in delivery so very similar but just a tiny bit different and it's probably just going to take these things that we've talked about and just flip it around just a little bit so that we're working in a different direction and you know exactly what I mean in just a second but first let's take a look at this image which is an illustration of public key encryption or another word would be asymmetric encryption where we have two keys a public key and a private key and the the public key is used to encrypt so Bob can encrypt a message designed to be sent to Elise and the only person that can read this message is elise because she actually uses her private key to decrypt it digital signing and confirmation is going to flip this around a little bit such that it looks like this elise is now going to use her private key to sign a message and then bob is going to use her public key to verify that that message came from her so let's take a little moment to talk about the top part we have a message we have a private key and we mix these together and that goes to Bob but it goes to him in such a way that the private key is not exposed and we're going to talk a little bit about how that works soon but for now just know that the message and the private key are mixed together and the the private key never gets exposed to anyone except Elise she is the only one who's going to have access to this private key but because the public key and the private key are somehow mathematically related the public key can actually be used to verify that the private key was used in the signature if someone else crafted the message that was supposedly from Elise well using this public key would expose that it's not Elise because that verification would not pass so this is very useful for messaging and it's also very useful for things such as files making sure that you're downloading the right files from web servers this can be used for all kinds of different things and a popular application that I am familiar with is the use inside of Bitcoin this video is not going to be about Bitcoin and the future collapse of our financial system as we know it I'll save that for it a different day because I'm not really into that right now I'm just really into the technology behind Bitcoin I just want to show you this meme real quick so with Bitcoin here's what's gonna happen we're going to use a signature algorithm called elliptic curve digital signature algorithm or it could decide and we talked about this a little bit in the previous episode when we talked about elliptic curves used for public key cryptography and when you have a private key that corresponds to funds on on the Bitcoin blockchain you basically have permission to spend that money with the public key a mathematical algorithm can be used on the signature to determine that it was originally produced from the hash and the private key so in other words it's just saying that the public key can be used to make sure the person spending the money has access to the private key so if somehow I was able to forge a transaction taking money from somebody and giving it to somebody else that is going to be rejected because the the private key is not present in the hash or the incorrect private key is present in the hash now we haven't really talked about hashes yet but this is essentially how the private key is not exposed when we are sending a message that is digitally signed with our private key the data is hashed and that's actually the topic for the next video so we're going to talk about that now something I just want you to notice with the asymmetric cryptography paying attention to the name it's not symmetric meaning that when you use the private key on one side you're going to use the public key on the other when you use the public key on one side you're going to use the private key on the other one here is used for encryption where the public key is used to encrypt and the other one is used for digital signatures where we're actually using the private key and the public key to confirm that the private key was used well just to be clear the goal here is not to make hello Bob super secret rather the goal here is to verify that hello Bob came from lys that's why I say this is different from encryption but obviously very very related all right back to spewing out Wikipedia articles here's a good one on digital signature shocking right but in here I wanted to point out that there are various signature algorithms so we talked about ECDSA which is the elliptic curve variant of a popular one known as DSA there is also the RSA signature scheme we talked about RSA earlier on in the series and then there's all these other ones that can be used now the next logical thing for me to talk about is hashing which is sort of a form of cryptography but we're going to talk about the details of that and how it's different in the next episode so be sure to check that out because this is a really important thing you need to know this is often used for things like storing passwords and databases and so forth so stay tuned please be sure to subscribe if you've enjoyed this content and yeah any any questions leave them in the comments and we'll get some discussion going peace out and I'll see in the next one you