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

Public key isn’t enough to decrypt the packages. Your private key is needed too.

Easiest way to understand this is, let’s say your private key is 9973, the largest 4 digit prime number and the public key is 997. Multiplication of these give you 9,943,081. Factoring out 9,943,081 is time consuming, but if you have the public key, it’s trivial.

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