Public-key encryption was a concept as simple as it was brilliant.
Public-key encryption was a concept as simple as it was brilliant. It consisted of easy-to-use, home-computer software that scrambled personal E-mail messages in such a way that they were totally unreadable. A user could write a letter and run it through the encryption software, and the text would come out the other side looking like random nonsense—totally illegible—a code. Anyone intercepting the transmission found only an unreadable garble on the screen.
The only way to unscramble the message was to enter the sender’s “pass-key”—a secret series of characters that functioned much like a PIN number at an automatic teller. The pass-keys were generally quite long and complex; they carried all the information necessary to instruct the encryption algorithm exactly what mathematical operations to follow to re-create the original message.
