The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. For thousands of years, if you wanted to send a secret message, there was basically one way to do it. You’d scramble the message using a ...

Nathan Eddy works as an independent filmmaker and journalist based in Berlin, specializing in architecture, business technology and healthcare IT. He is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill ...

Public key encryption has long been a cornerstone in securing digital communications, allowing messages to be encrypted with a recipient’s publicly available key while only being decrypted by the ...

The security system that underlies the internet makes use of a curious fact: You can broadcast part of your encryption to make your information much more secure. When you purchase through links on our ...

For the last five years, the FIDO Alliance -- led by Apple, Microsoft, and Google (with other companies in tow) -- has been blazing a trail toward a future where passwords are no longer necessary in ...

In the context of cryptography, a public key is an alphanumeric string that serves as an essential component of asymmetric encryption algorithms. It is typically derived from a private key, which must ...

Public and private keys are the fundamental building blocks of secure transactions in the world of cryptocurrencies. These cryptographic instruments existed long before digital currencies were ...

Microsoft prepares for security in a world where our old codes are easily broken. Get familiar with these technologies now before they become necessary. Much of what we do to keep our online lives ...

Many discussions of “hybrid encryption” begin with some debate about just what this means. Hybrid encryption in general refers to the combined use of public-key (asymmetric) cryptography with ...

On April 24, the FBI's war against public key encryption technology—the kind many of us use for texting, emailing, and online banking—entered a new phase. The FBI published a notice in the Federal ...