this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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Privacy
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As far as I understand a key pair can be used bi-directionally like I'd described. Was I mistaken?
In practice, the private key is usually used to create signatures instead, but I avoided that for simplicity.
You're not mistaken, it is definitely possible with at least RSA, though, I would guess it may not always be possible. It also sounds like it's still a bad idea unless you know all of the parameters used to generate the keys and can be sure what information is actually encoded in the keys.
no, it isn't bidirectional, public = encrypt, private = decrypt, that's it. You can address a message to multiple recipients though (when using GPG), so often in case of email a message is addressed both to yourself and your recipient, so both you and your recipient have access to message text