Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
I have a follow up question to Given a private key, is it possible to derive it’s public key?
Are the public and the private keys the ‘same’ (in the sense that you just choose to make one public) or can you do more with the private key than with the public key?
EDIT – to better state my question:
When the two keys are generated, could I just randomly choose one of them to be the public key?
It really depends on what you call ‘private key.’ In almost every practical sitation, the sender knowing the private key also knows the public key. It provides others with its public key so it needs to know it. So in essence, that ‘private key’ will contain ‘public key’ information or at least it can be derived from it.
Generally, you cannot swap private and public keys. In fact, they are not always of the same type (depending on the cryptosystem used). For instance, in ECDSA, your public key is a two-dimensional ‘point’ on an elliptic curve, whereas your private key is a number.