5.4. Signatures and Certificates
The public and private keys used in asymmetric cryptography are created as a matched pair. In fact, there is usually nothing mathematical about them that makes one public and the other private. This distinction reflects nothing more than your choice to keep one and give the other away.
Because the two keys are both capable of the same mathematical tricks, it's possible for you to encrypt a message using the key that you kept (the private key). If you do so, then the rest of the world can read the message using the public key that you gave away. How can this be of any value, if the whole world can read it? Well, the point is that if a message decrypts successfully using a given key, then it must have been created ...
Get Sun Certified Enterprise Architect for J2EE™ Technology Study Guide now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
