Public-key cryptography
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Public-key cryptography is a method for secret communication between two parties without requiring an initial exchange of secret keys. It can also be used to create digital signatures. Public key cryptography is a fundamental and widely used technology around the world, and enables secure transmission of information on the Internet.
It is also known as asymmetric cryptography because the key used to encrypt a message differs from the key used to decrypt it. In public key cryptography, a user has a pair of cryptographic keys — a public key and a private key. The private key is kept secret, while the public key may be widely distributed. Messages are encrypted with the recipient's public key and can only be decrypted with the corresponding private key. The keys are related mathematically, but the private key cannot be practically derived from the public key. Conversely, secret-key cryptography, also known as symmetric cryptography, uses a single secret key for both encryption and decryption. To use symmetric cryptography for communication, the sender and receiver must share a key in advance.
