Now Alice can send Bob the file message.txt.gpg and not only is Bob the only person able to decrypt it, he can also verify that it came from Alice as long as he has Alice’s public key.

Public key vs. private key: Key differences Here are some of the key differences between public and private keys based on their visibility, purpose, encryption, length, ownership and verification.

Using public key cryptography, Alice sends her message to Bob and encrypts it using his public key. Anyone can intercept the message, but only Bob can decrypt it using his private key.

In the above figure, Alice uses Bob’s public key (shown as EBob) to encrypt the session key. When Bob receives Alice’s message, he decrypts it using his private key (DBob).

Since Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adleman – the R, S and A in RSA Security – introduced Alice and Bob in their seminal public-key cryptosystem paper in 1978, the couple has become the ...

The Diffie-Hellman algorithm was a stunning breakthrough in cryptography that showed cryptographic keys could be securely exchanged in plain sight. Here’s how it works.