On 17/05/12 21:49, James Knott wrote:
Basil Chupin wrote:
And how would you send the private one to several people who may be living in different parts of the world?
You would never do that. You're supposed to keep the private key secret and share the public key. Someone sending you a message would use your public key to encrypt it and then you'd use your private key to decrypt it. That's the whole point of public key encryption, so that it's easy to share exchange keys, without requiring secure means to do so. With public key encryption there are 2 keys and one can decrypt what the other has encrypted. But either key cannot decrypt what it has encrypted.
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? :-) . (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 :-) .) 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