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?
In: Technology
When you use those kind of systems you have 3 keys.
A Public Key you display publicly unencrypted.
A Private Key you never send.
And a Random Key which you send encrypted.
You need your Private Key in order to read anything encrypted with your Public Key.
The math makes it very very hard to figure out your Private Key if you have only the Public Key. Even if you have a whole bunch of messages and know exactly what they say, it’s still way too hard for people to do it.
The problem is the math for this whole Public Key/Private Key business takes a lot of computing power to do.
So rather than do the whole email like that, they use cipher that’s faster, and just use the Public Key/Private Key to send the key for that one.
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