Public Key vs Private Key | Asymmetric vs Symmetric Encryption
When transmitting data over the Internet as plain text, it’s easy for someone to use some kind of packet sniffer like WireShark to capture the packets. A malicious person, could listen in on the conversation you had with your girlfriend or worse yet, steals passwords and credit card information. Fortunately, some very smart people came up with a way to encode information for transit and to validate someone’s identity. The process by which convert ordinary plain text into unintelligible text and vice-versa is known as cryptography.
The most basic form of encryption is called the Caesar Cypher.
In essence, both parties have a symmetric key which specifies what characters map to what symbol of the encrypted text. Those who don’t possess the key cannot read the message. For example, in the preceding image, the character ‘A’ would be encoded as a ‘t’ in our encrypted message. The individual on the receiving end could then use the same Caesar Cypther to decode the message.
In the realm of computing, the problem with symmetric encryption algorithms is that another party could be listening when you go to give the other party the…
