Why use encryption for emails if you have to share the public key?

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Why would you use something like PGP if you have to send your encryption key unencrypted to the party you are sending to? And if you leave this key out on something like Twitter for example, couldn’t law enforcement or a third party if they gained access to the other persons email still read the contents of the encrypted email by using this key? Doesn’t this defeate the purpose of using encryption?

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33 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

You are looking at it backwards.

Here’s how it goes.

You want to send someone a encrypted message. You ask them to send you a public key and you use that to encrypt the message you send them. Only they have the private key and only the private key can decrypt the message.

If you want them to send you an encrypted message, you can’t use the same keys form before, they don’t work in reverse, so you need to create a public/private key pair and send them the public key. And any messages they send back encrypted with that key can only be opened with your private key.

If anyone gets the public keys all they can do is encrypt messages. And only the person with the private key can decrypt them.

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