Eli5 what is pgp key and how does it work
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PGP believe it or not stands for Pretty Good Privacy. The people who developed it back in the 90s originally named it that.
Basically when you set up PGP on a computer, you create a key pair. There is always 2 keys. You have a private key and a public key.
So if you can imagine a drop box in front of a bank or a similar type institution. Businesses will get their daily deposits ready, then go to the drop, and take their bag of money and stuff, and use a key to open the door and drop it into the drop box. Once they drop it in, it falls down a chute into the bank. They can’t get it back. And they can’t get to other people’s money.
In the morning, the bank manager or whomever is responsible for doing it, will come in and use a different key to open a door on the inside of the bank. They will take out all the bags that have all the drops. Then they will open them and process them into the accounts of the businesses.
PGP works like that but for computer data.
Once a person generates a key pair, they keep the private key safe for their use only, they don’t give it out to anybody. But they give the PUBLIC key to people to send them information, email, documents, whatever that needs to be encrypted.
The person sending the information, over the internet, on a flash drive, however, uses the PGP program to encrypt the data using the PUBLIC key, then sends it to the person receiving the data that has the PRIVATE key.
Once the person with the private key receives the data. They then use their private key with the PGP program to open the data, decrypt it, and use it for whatever purpose they need it for.
As long as the private key remains safe in the hands of the person who creates it, then only that person will be able to decrypt the data.
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