Encryption Keys

Encryption is the process of converting an existing message, the plain-text, into a new, encrypted message that will be completely unintelligible to an eavesdropper. Decryption is the reverse process, which transforms the encrypted message into the original plain-text.

Usually encryption and decryption processes involve an additional piece of information: a key. If both sender and receiver share the same key, the process is referred to as symmetric cryptography. If sender and receiver have different, complementary keys, the process is called asymmetric or public key cryptography. In public key cryptography, there is a pair of keys: one public and the other private. The public key can be made freely available, whereas the owner keeps the private key secret. These two keys are complementary; a message encrypted with one of the keys can be decrypted only by the other key.