Public-key cryptography

Abstract

This chapter presents an asymmetric approach to cryptography - it uses different keys for encryption and decryption. The key for encryption is announced publically so that everybody can encode a message. Only the owner of the matching secret key can decode the encrypted message. Most cryptographic schemes used today in the Internet are based on asymmetric algorithms using a secret and a public key. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.