How to keep your email private with PGP encryption on your Mac

In our last episode of Private I, I explained the basics of public-key (PK) cryptography, a way to scramble messages in a way that only someone possessing a particular key can decrypt, without that key ever having to be publicly disclosed or shared. It’s an effective system that has no known theoretical exploits, and currently deployed implementations are considered robust.

And to recap: The clever bit with the public-key approach is that you have two complementary keys, one public and one private. The public key can be freely distributed. Anything encrypted by someone else with the public key can only be decrypted by having access to the corresponding private key. And a private key can be used to “sign” a string of text or a document to prove mathematically that only the private key’s possessor could have signed it.

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