Public Key Cryptography

Public key cryptography provides the means for secure communication and data protection, enabling activities such as secure online transactions, encrypted email communications, etc.

Public key cryptography employs a pair of cryptographic keys—a public key and a private key—to create a highly secure method of transmitting information over online networks.

It's easy to make a public key from a private key, but the opposite is rather difficult, if not impossible. This keeps things safe. You can freely share your public key without risking your private key, which remains secure.

Encryption and Signatures

Public key cryptography allows individuals to send encrypted messages and data that can only be deciphered by the intended recipient possessing their corresponding private key. In other words, the public key functions as a lock, and the private key serves as an actual unique key that unlocks the encrypted data.

This encryption process not only ensures the privacy and confidentiality of sensitive information but also establishes the authenticity of the sender. By combining the sender's private key with the public key, a digital signature is created. This signature serves as a digital stamp of approval, verifying the sender's identity and the validity of the transferred data. Anyone with your public key can verify that the person who initiated the transaction used your private key.

Keys on the Client Side

Every transaction must be signed by an account authority. The private key or controller material for that authority must stay secret, so client software is responsible for secure storage and signing.

WARNING

All clients are different, but plain-text client configuration is only suitable for development and controlled test networks. Production integrations should use a secret manager, hardware-backed key storage, or another audited signing boundary.

This is currently a reference implementation that will not be a part of the production release.

Registering a new account entails generating controller material, such as an Ed25519 key pair, and submitting the public part to the network. Later transactions from that account must be signed by the matching private key or by the configured account controller policy.

For public key cryptography to work effectively, avoid re-using keys when you need to specify a new key. While there's nothing stopping you from doing that, the public keys are public, which means that if an attacker sees the same public key being used, they will know that the private keys are also identical.

Even though private keys operate on slightly different principles than passwords, the advice—to make them as random as possible, never store them unencrypted and never share them with anyone under any circumstances—applies.