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
The encryption serves as proof that “you” sent it. It’s effectively a signature and the public key is how you verify it.
When you make a new encryption key, you’re making a pair of two keys. There’s a private key, which you can use to encrypt, and a public key, which can be used to decrypt. Thanks to fancy math, this is one way and you can’t reverse engineer the private key.
For the purpose of private conversation, there are key exchange protocols to produce a “shared secret” for end to end encryption. Again, fancy math is involved
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