Computer Security and Cryptography

CHAPTER 10

THE PARADIGM OF PUBLIC KEY CRYPTOGRAPHY

THE ENLARGED role of information processing in non-governmental applications, the emergence of the Internet and its potential for commercial transactions over public data networks (E-commerce) became the stimulus for the development of a new type of cryptographic system. While governments have couriers capable of distributing keys between users by an alternative secure path, commercial users needed a new approach to securely connect two users over a potentially insecure networks. The solution was public key cryptography in which the capability to encipher data was separated from the capability to decipher it. This chapter introduces the concepts and implications of public key cryptographic systems.