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How do you get a secret key into the right hands while keeping it out of the wrong ones?

Wired
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64% Informative

The foundations for public key cryptography were discovered between 1970 and 1974 by British mathematicians working for the U.K. Government Communications Headquarters , the same government agency that cracked the Nazi Enigma code during World War II .

Public key cryptography relies not on keeping a key secret but rather on making it widely available.

In this scheme, anyone can make messages invisible, but only Natasha can make them visible again.

Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin couldn’t exist without this idea.

But it does prove that you, and only you, created the message, since as the holder of the private key, only you could have encrypted the message.

In 1994 , the mathematician Peter Shor discovered a way for quantum computers to efficiently reverse the trapdoor functions that underlie most current public key cryptography systems, including prime factorization.