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It's
personal. It's private. And it's no one's business but
yours. You
may be planning a political campaign, discussing your taxes,
or having an illicit affair. Or you may be doing something
that you feel shouldn't be illegal, but is. Whatever it
is, you don't want your private electronic mail (E-mail)
or confidential documents read by anyone else.
- Philip
Zimmermann, Why
Do You Need PGP?.
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For as long as people have needed to conduct private conversations
across distances, a variety of encryption methods
have been used to protect secret communications. However, the
introduction of electronic communications networks raised an old
encryption problem to
a new level -- how do two people establish secure
communications when they live so far apart that they can't meet
first to exchange a secret decryption key?
The solution to this problem is an encryption method called Public
Key Cryptography (PKC), an ingenious mathematical structure that
doesn't
need participants
to meet beforehand to conduct secure communications.
PKC technology also provides a clever method of attaching an encrypted
signature to a message to guarantee authenticity. PKC is now the
engine for
almost all high grade encryption on the Internet,
including financial
transactions on
websites and implementation of the highest level virtual
private networks. The following
sections
provide
more information.