July 2017
Beginner to intermediate
358 pages
10h 54m
English
Public-key cryptography was introduced by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman in 1975 to get around the need for both sides to know the secret key. In fact, they were not the first to invent it; it was developed by the British Secret Service some years earlier, but was kept a military secret.
Public-key cryptography uses a pair of keys for encryption; you may also hear it called asymmetric encryption. The public key is used for encrypting information, while the private key can only be used for decrypting. Because there is no way to determine the private key from the public key, it is common for public keys to be published to the world.
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