| Summary: | Public-key cryptography, which makes digital signatures simple, may become one of the most common technologies of the information age, underpinning a variety of routine electronic transactions. This technology could keep private messages sent through electronic mail from being opened by unauthorized parties. In this form of cryptography, each person has a disclosed public key and a secret private key. Messages encoded with the private key can only be decoded with the corresponding public key, and vice versa. The heart of any such system is the mathematical function, which takes in a message and a key and puts out a code; the greatest success to date is associated with prime factorization algorithms, of which the most popular is the RSA algorithm.
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