Public-key Cryptography
Public-key cryptography is a way of encrypting data. It’s also called asymmetric cryptography because two different encryption keys are used. A public key is used to encrypt the data. Any number of people could have this key. It can only be used to encrypt data, so it doesn’t matter if it’s shared. A different key is needed to decrypt the data—this is a private key and no one but the recipient of the data has access to this.
What Small and Midsize Businesses Need to Know About Public-key Cryptography
Public-key encryption helps eliminate some of the risks of electronic communication for businesses. Requiring a separate key to decrypt messages can prevent digital eavesdropping. This keeps business-critical information private. It also allows recipients to easily check if messages are authentic.
Related terms
- Haptics
- WAN (Wide-Area Network)
- Intranet
- SLO (Service-Level Objective)
- Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR)
- Scalability
- Service-Level Agreement (SLA)
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
- Identity and Access Management (IAM)
- Data Center
- Augmented Reality (AR)
- Synchronous
- Multitenancy
- Chief Information Officer (CIO)
- IT Services
- Authorization
- Service-oriented Architecture (SOA)
- Platform as a Service (PaaS)
- Managed Service Provider (MSP)
- Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
