Eli5: when something is digitally encrypted, how does the receiver get a key to open it without having to send the key with the original information?
In: Technology
You don’t encrypt with the same key used to decrypt. Every person has their own private decrypt key, and their public encrypt key that anyone can get. If I want to send a message to Obama, his encrypt key is public so I get that and use it to encrypt the message which then only he can decrypt using his private key.
This is made possible because of math, your public key is a very large number that people use to encrypt messages sent to you, now it’s impossible to decrypt that message without knowing the two prime factors making up that large number.
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