PUBLIC-KEY ENCRYPTION

A cryptographic system that uses two keys. The first key is a public key known to everyone and the second key is a private key known only to the recipient of the message. A key to the public key system is that the public and private keys are related in such a way that only the public key can be used to encrypt messages and only the corresponding private key can be used to decrypt them. For example: when Customer A wants to send a secure message to Customer B, Customer A uses Customer B's public key to encrypt the message. Customer B then uses their private key to decrypt it. It is virtually impossible to deduce the private key if you know the public key. Public-key systems, such as Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), are becoming popular for transmitting information via the Internet. Public key cryptography was invented in 1976 by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman. For this reason, it is sometimes called Diffie-Hellman encryption. It is also called asymmetric encryption because it uses two keys instead of one key (symmetric encryption). They are extremely secure and relatively simple to use.