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CAcert children's page | History of Encryption | Become a Professional Agent] Krypto and Kryptina, your agent partners (with the boss)

Welcome to the CAcert children's page

History of Cryptography

Do you know when people first sent secret messages? A an thrilling Lego film shows you how secret scripts have developed over the last 2000 years and how modern e-mail encryption works.

Become a professional agent

Would you like to become a professional agent yourself like Krypto and Kryptina? On our Agent Page they show you the best secret scripts!

Who's CAcert and what do they do?

On the Internet, everyone can choose a name for themselves. In the chat I might be called LittleFrog37, the e-mail address stonewall12@email.org and on the music download page grungy. To be honest, the grungy is a bit embarrassing for me. I guess I'll have to change that soon. That it has to be like this (so the embarrassing names don't, but the names I chose myself do) has to do with how the internet works. If a stranger follows you on the way to school, you see him. You can run away, call your colleague, ... On the Internet, on the other hand, strangers can spy on you without you even noticing. That's why people put on a mask (a nickname) so these strangers don't know who they are.

But there are moments when you have to say who you are on the Internet. When your mother drops you out of school, the school naturally wants to be sure that your mother is really your mother. Or if you want to access your bank account, of course it should only work if the bank is absolutely sure that you are you. In such cases you will need an identity card, for example an electronic identity card. These are called certificates. Even if you want to send e-mails in an envelope that no one can read, you need a certificate. Such certificates can be bought from companies. A group of people for whom this was too expensive have joined forces to produce such certificates together - but free of charge. This is CAcert.

You can apply for such an electronic identity card on the CAcert website. Once you are 14 years old, you can also do a training to check people, because anyone who wants a certificate must first meet with two or three CAcert trusted people, who check with passport or identity card whether they are really the ones they claim to be. This is the Junior Assurer Program.

CAcert at school

You find these pages exciting? Would you like to learn such things at school? Then tell your teacher about this page. For them there are a lot of great teaching suggestions on the following pages:

Picture: Karlsruhe University of Education

Children (last edited 2019-08-09 07:58:17 by EtienneRuedin)