Section 2.7 Asymmetric Encryption
The image, captioned ’asymmetric,’ is a flowchart that visually explains the process of asymmetric encryption. It displays a sequence of five stages from left to right, connected by arrows, illustrating data transformation using a public and private key pair.
The process begins with a document icon labeled ’Plaintext’. An arrow points to a key-shaped icon explicitly labeled ’Public’ (and also ’Encryption’), representing encryption with the public key. This transforms the data into a document icon labeled ’Ciphertext’. From the ciphertext, another arrow points to a different key-shaped icon explicitly labeled ’Private’ (and also ’Decryption’), representing decryption with the private key. A final arrow leads to a document icon labeled ’Plaintext’, showing the original data successfully recovered.
This diagram clearly illustrates the core principle of asymmetric encryption: a public key is used for the encryption process, and its corresponding, distinct private key is required for the decryption process, ensuring that only the intended recipient holding the private key can access the original plaintext.
An asymmetric encryption algorithm has actually already been demonstrated in the Mathematical Foundation 2.4 section. Asymmetric encryption has a public key which can be published anywhere and used to encrypt messages that only the holder of the private key, which is not published, can unencrypt. For example if you want to receive encrypted emails you may make your GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) public key available a public key server. This would allow anyone to look up your public key, encrypt a message that only you can read, and send you the ciphertext. Asymmetric encryption gets around the difficulties of key exchange via an untrusted channel (like email). Unfortunately the cost of such a useful system is that asymmetric algorithms tend to be much slower that their symmetric counterparts.
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