The key pair is based on prime numbers of long length. Although a message sent from one computer to another won't be secure since the public key used for encryption is published and available to anyone, anyone who picks it up can't read it without the private key. To decode an encrypted message, a computer must use the public key, provided by the originating computer, and its own private key. The private key must remain confidential to its respective owner, while the public key is made available to everyone via a publicly accessible repository or directory. Public-key encryption uses two different keys at once, a combination of a private key and a public key.

How do you share a secret key with each other without the risk of someone on the internet intercepting it in the middle? In November 1976, a paper published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Information Theory by Diffie and Hellman, titled ' New Directions in Cryptography ,' addressed this problem and offered up a solution: public-key encryption.Īlso known as asymmetric encryption, public key cryptography is used as a method of assuring the confidentiality, authenticity and non-repudiation of electronic communications and data storage. When connecting to a website on the public internet it becomes more complicated and symmetric encryption, by itself, won’t work because you don’t control the other end of the connection. It cannot be used to ensure the integrity and/or authenticity. Management of an increasing number of secret keys becomes a “key management problem.” Further, symmetric cryptography ensures only the ‘confidentiality’ of the transmitted or stored data.

When the number of connected users grows, so does the number of required keys. The most important disadvantages of symmetric encryption are the key distribution problem and the key management problem. The main advantage of symmetric cryptography is that it is much faster than asymmetric cryptography. If the individual keys are misplaced, the message can be decrypted by malicious actors. ” The key that is the vital component in symmetric cryptography and we cannot afford to lose it or misplace it.

Distributing the key in a secure way is one of the primary challenges of symmetric encryption, which is known as the “ key distribution problem. Symmetric encryption heavily relies on the fact that the keys must be kept secret. In symmetric encryption, the sender and receiver use a separate instance of the same key to encrypt and decrypt messages.

Who uses rsa encryption