I’ve been trying to get my head around this and I’ve watched a few videos but they don’t seem to specifically answer my question.

According to what I’ve found online, messages encrypted with a public key can only be decrypted with a private key. But in practice, how is that possible?

Surely a public key contains a set of instructions, and anyone could just run those instructions in reverse to decrypt a message? If everything you need to encrypt a message is stored within a public key, then how is it a one-way process?

It’s likely that I’m misunderstanding a core element of this!

  • howrar@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    The same word will be encrypted the same way each time, and that’s actually the basis of one of the known attacks on LLMs like ChatGPT. They send responses back one “word” at a time, so someone who’s snooping can easily figure out what it’s saying from the encrypted messages. The exploit doesn’t affect Bard because it sends larger chunks of text at a time.