Combining Public and Secret Keys
So one can take advantage of both security approaches by using Public Key Infrastructure to initialize a session
- One participant chooses a random secret key
- This is encrypted using public key of recipient
- recipient decodes this digital envelope with his or her private key
Thereby they have set up joint knowledge of a secret key without usual disadvantages
- secret key is used for rest of session
Note secret key is only used for this session and so one must break in real time