Address key locks email

When you pay for a book online or check stock quotes from your mobile phone, your password and credit card number are kept secure by an encryption scheme; one of the most widely used ways to spy-proof transactions is to use encryption keys.

In this type of encryption, each party has two keys: one to lock, or encrypt, messages and the other to unlock, or decrypt, them. If I wanted to send you a confidential message, I would look up your public key, use it to encrypt the message and then send my message to you. The only way to decipher the coded message would be your private decryption key.

Looking up a public key takes time and requires the receiver to first set one up. A pair of researchers has made the process easier with a scheme that automatically generates public keys using something most people have already made publicly available: an email address.

Using a person's unique email address as a public key makes it possible to send encrypted messages without having to look anything ... // 80% Remaining