Comment on With public key cryptography, why can't someone decrypt a message using the public key?

rufus@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

It think the common analogy is a padlock and a key. One party gets the padlock and the other one the key. Now with the padlock you can just lock the box but not open it. And with the key you can just unlock and open the box.

The maths behind that is a bit difficult to explain but not that difficult. I think it’s about one-way functions that are easy to calculate in one direction and impossible to solve the other way around. Like the old approaches with prime numbers. It’s easy to multiply two prime numbers. But given an arbitrary number, it’s difficult to tell which prime numbers it consists of.

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