How to turn the key to privacy
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Encryption sounds complicated, but is merely a dressed-up version of the secret codes that cloak-and-dagger types have used since Roman times. Plaintext, or ordinary language, is put into ciphertext, which is any kind of combination of letters and numbers.
Ciphertext can be encoded and decoded with two kinds of "keys": synchronous and asynchronous. With synchronous codes, the same key used to put encode is used to decode. A key is a long string of numbers and it is used by a mathematical algorithm to unlock the code.
Asynchronous codes use public and private keys. The same keys can't be used to lock and unlock a message. Everyone using a particular computer system has their own public and private keys. Public keys could be known by many people. Private keys are known only by the user.
Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article
Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments