On 18/05/12 17:28, Ed Greshko wrote:
On 05/18/2012 03:13 PM, Basil Chupin wrote:
Sounds reasonable, but..... if I send an e-mail encrypted with my secret private key and the person at the other end has the public key then surely if my message is intercepted by anyone who has that public key then it can be read by anyone who has that public key. The "interceptor" may not be able to read a response to my original post, only I can do that with my secret and private key, but they surely would be able to read whatever *I* post. No? :-) . You have it wrong....
If you want to send an encrypted message to someone you encrypt the message using *their* public key and they un-encrypt using their *private* key.
You *sign* messages with your private key and the signature is checked with your public key.
Aaah, now I understand. Thanks, Ed, for the clear description of how it works.
(There has to be more to this than I have read so far........ just like my question about VirtualBox which seems to be understood on how it works by everyone except by me :-) .) The details of public/private key encryption is interesting.
in email.... When the text portion of a message is encrypted it is encrypted using a one time, two-way key (same key is used to encrypt and un-encrypt).
At this point you lost me...... :-( ......
Now, if you have 3 recipients that key is encrypted 3 times using the public keys for each of the recipients. They (their client) then un-encrypt the key and that key is then used to un-encrypt the message.
....but what you said above is clear enough. Now I know all about how encryption works! :-) BC -- Using openSUSE 12.1 x86_64 KDE 4.8.3 and kernel 3.3.6 on a system with- AMD FX 8-core 3.6/4.2GHz processor 16GB PC14900/1866MHz Quad Channel Corsair "Vengeance" RAM Gigabyte AMD3+ m/board; Gigabyte nVidia GTX550Ti 1GB DDR5 GPU -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org