| 1 |
This is much younger than other approaches and was first published in 1975. As we have discussed this has key feature of only needing one key per individual/organization requiring encrypted authenticated messaging
|
| 2 |
It has nontrivial infrastructure to distribute the N public keys for N organizations but this is better than N2 keys for secret key cryptography
|
| 3 |
Roughly the public key is a very large number that is the product of two primes. The private key is (related to) one of these primes.
|
| 4 |
It is used differently in two cases
-
Transmission over insecure network where one encodes with public key of receiver (and receiver decodes with their private key)
-
Authentication where you encode signature with private key and check the signature with public key
|
