Public key cryptography

Public key cryptography is a form of cryptography that uses a public and private key pair.

First, a private key is randomly generated. A difficult-to-reverse mathematical transformation is applied to the private key to derive a public one.

It is trivial to verify a public key, but difficult to reverse-engineer it to find the private key.

== (?) asymmetric key algorithm ==

== (?) what cryptographic algorithms would be safe if we ever prove that P = NP? ==