Diffie-Hellman key exchange

The DH key exchange solves a problem that’s lurking for quite some time now: How do you encrypt a message so it can only be read by the person you sent the message to?

The easiest way to solve this would be to come up with a cipher i.e. a=1, b=2, etc. The main problem here is that both parties need to agree on the cipher.

The benefits?

1. Both parties don’t need to know the cipher.

2. The encrypted messages are extremely hard to decode.

Diffie-Hellman has 2 keys: a public key and a private key. Everyone can have your public key but when you want to send a message, you can encrypt it using the public key. Only the private key can be used to decrypt it.