Public Key Encryption

As modern computers began to render many encoding schemes useless, Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie developed a method that seemed to guarantee secure communications without the need for a secret key. These alogrithms lead to several varieties of public key encryption (PKE). PKE addresses three issues that flaw many encryption schemes:

1. PKE is computationally difficult to decode.
2. PKE does not require a secure channel to send the key; the key is, in fact, public.
3. PKE can be used as a basis of a personal (digital) signature so that the sender may always be identified.