this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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Explain Like I'm Five

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How is the Recipient the Only One Able to Decrypt End to End Encryption? (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I understand that in end to end encryption the message is encrypted and only the recipient has the key to Decrypt it. How is the key transmitted, and how can the key not get intercepted with the message?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

At the most basic level, what you need to understand is that each user of a service creates a key pair. A PRIVATE key that DECRYPTS messages and the matching PUBLIC KEY that ENCRYPTS data.

So if I give you my public key, you can use it encode your messages to me.

When data is encrypted with a public key, it undergoes a mathematical transformation. The specific transformation is designed so that the data can't be feasibly reverted (decrypted) using the same public key. Only the private key, due to its unique mathematical properties, can reverse this transformation.