At the foundation of all digital security lies cryptography. It is the mathematical art of keeping secrets in plain sight. For decades, symmetric encryption was the standard: the same key was used to both lock and unlock the data.
The solution came in the 1970s with the invention of asymmetric, or public-key, cryptography. This ingenious system utilizes a pair of mathematically linked keys. One key is public, freely distributed to anyone. The other is private, kept strictly secret by the owner.
If you want to send a secure message, you encrypt it using the recipient's public key. Once encrypted, the math ensures that it can only be decrypted by the corresponding private key. This breakthrough solved the key distribution problem.
