What is Public Key Cryptography and how does it work?
Public Key Cryptography or Asymmetric Cryptography forms the basis of digital signatures and Public Key Infrastructure. This technique makes use of a pair of mathematically related, but different keys – a private key and a public key. The private key is kept secret and is only accessible to its owner; the public key is intended for wide distribution. If one key is used to encrypt a message, then only the other key in the pair can be used to decrypt it. The public key can be used to verify a message signed with the private key, or to encrypt messages that can only be decrypted by the private key.
