The History of Public Key Cryptography

The key distribution problem is a significant part of the art and science of cryptography. If you can just meet your recipient behind the barn and whisper the key to them, you're fine. But these kinds of in-person approaches don't work if you're dealing with modern digital encryption formats that involve complex mathematical functions. The core breakthrough behind the public key approach lay in the idea of splitting the key into two parts,. A public key allows the sender to encrypt the message in such a way that it can only be deciphered by the recipient's private key.