.NET Security and Cryptography

The Idea Behind Asymmetric Cryptography

In the 1970s Martin Hellman, Whitfield Diffie, and, independently, Ralph Merkle invented a beautiful cryptographic idea. Their idea was to solve the key exchange and trust problems of symmetric cryptography by replacing the single shared secret key with a pair of mathematically related keys, one of which can be made publicly available and another that must be kept secret by the individual who generated the key pair. The advantages are obvious. First, no key agreement is required in advance, since the only key that needs to be shared with the other party is a public key that can be safely shared with everyone. Second, whereas the security of a symmetric algorithm depends on two parties successfully keeping ...