digital signatures ⇝

digital signature

<cryptography>

Extra data appended to a message which identifies and authenticates the sender and message data using public-key encryption.

The sender uses a one-way hash function to generate a hash-code of about 32 bits from the message data. He then encrypts the hash-code with his private key. The receiver recomputes the hash-code from the data and decrypts the received hash with the sender's public key. If the two hash-codes are equal, the receiver can be sure that data has not been corrupted and that it came from the given sender.

Last updated: 1995-02-07

Nearby terms:

Digital Signal Processing Language ♦ digital signature ♦ digital signatures

Try this search on Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Google, OneLook.

Loading