1976 saw the introduction of a radical new idea into the field of cryptography. This idea centered around the premise of making the encryption and decryption keys different - where the knowledge of one key would not allow a person to find out the other. Public key encryption algorithms are based on the premise that each sender and recipient has a private key, known only to him/her and a public key, which can be known by anyone. Each encryption/decryption process requires at least one public key and one private key. A key is a randomly generated set of numbers/ characters that is used to encrypt/decrypt information.
A public key encryption scheme has six major parts:
Plaintext - this is the text message to which an algorithm is applied.
Encryption Algorithm - it performs mathematical operations to conduct substitutions and transformations to the plaintext.
Public and Private Keys - these are a pair of keys where one is used for encryption and the other for decryption.
Ciphertext - this is the encrypted or scrambled message produced by applying the algorithm to the plaintext message using key.
Decryption Algorithm - This algorithm generates the ciphertext and the matching key to produce the plaintext.
Fri Mar 20, 2015 10:19 am
emma
Joined: 12 Dec 2013 Posts: 78
Brilliant ! I must say that this is the best description I have found so far about public key encryption technique. The way you have explained the technical details of this process is worth noticing.
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