Solidity Programming Essentials

Asymmetric encryption and decryption

Asymmetric cryptography refers to the process of using two keys for encryption and decryption. Any key can be used for encryption and decryption. Message encryption with a public key can be decrypted using a private key and messages encrypted by a private key can be decrypted using a public key. Let's understand this with the help of an example. Tom uses Alice's public key to encrypt messages and sends it to Alice. Alice can use her private key to decrypt the message and extract contents out of it. Messages encrypted with Alice's public key can only be decrypted by Alice as only she holds her private key and no one else. This is the general use case of asymmetric keys. There is another use which we will ...