On Jul 7, 2004, at 2:19 PM, Marta Edie wrote: > What is "if you like" ? I thought Lee told me to delete them. They > kept multiplying, so i took a good look at the long line of what I > considered duplicates and did a "delete" job.
I don't think I meant you should delete them, only that there's no harm in deleting them. Here's what they are. The idea behind public key encryption is that every user is issued two keys: a public key and a private key. The public key is distributed for everyone to read. The private key is kept secret. When you receive a signed message, it contains a digital signature that's derived from the content of the message and the private key of the sender. Using the public key of the sender and some tricky mathematics, the signature can be verified as having been generated using the sender's private key. It also verifies that the content of the message has not been changed. (But, the private key cannot be determined in the process.) What you are seeing in your keychain are the public keys of the senders. Your mail program gets them from the company that issued the keys. In this case, that's Thawte, based in South Africa. Here's another way to think of it. Users are given two keys because anything locked with one of the keys can only be unlocked with the other. One of the keys is kept secret and the other is made public. A message locked with your public key can only be unlocked with your private key and a message locked with your private key can only be unlocked with your public key. | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be July 27. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
