Differences between version 2 and predecessor to the previous major change of PublicKey.
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| Newer page: | version 2 | Last edited on Wednesday, November 5, 2003 9:21:28 pm | by CraigBox | Revert |
| Older page: | version 1 | Last edited on Friday, July 26, 2002 3:33:08 pm | by WikiAdmin | Revert |
@@ -1,7 +1,3 @@
-The public part of Public key encryption
.
+The public part of PublicKeyEncryption
.
-The idea behind public key encryption is that you have two parts of
a key, a public part (which can be given to everyone) and a PrivateKey (which you keep to yourself)
. If you encrypt something with the public key then it can be only decrypted with the private key, and visa versa
. Given the
public key, you can't deduce the private key
, and usually visa versa (although not always). Thus you publish you public key
to the world, and then they can send you encrypted email.
-
-You can "Sign" a document by taking a CryptographicHash of the document, and encrypting
that with your private key. Everyone can calculate the hash
, and then decrypt the version you gave and verify
that they are the same (the document hasn't been modified) and they know that it came from you (since you are the
only one that has your
private key).
-
-You
can then sign other peoples key to say that you verify that
it is them. This is known as the WebOfTrust
.
+Stored in [SSH] as
a file often called 'identity
.pub'
. You download people's
public key using gpg --recv-keys
, or from their webpage
, to verify
that something signed
with their PrivateKey really came from them
, or to encrypt something so
that only their
private key can decode
it.
