The US and Ireland signed an agreement on electronic commerce, also known as ecommerce, on September 4, 1998. Notably, this was the first international agreement of its kind to be signed using smart card-based electronic signatures. When coded messages began to be passed electronically, these problems became even more acute. The situation changed, however, when the power of computers became apparent. That kind of computing power quickly became available to a wider audience and with the advent of PC's in the 1980s, rapidly became available even to individuals.
Encryption is based on factoring numbers into a product of primes.
The private key is kept by the original user and never given out. Secrecy is relatively easy because there is never any need to transmit the private key. The public key, on the other hand, is distributed as widely as possible without any necessity for secrecy. The combination of the two keys makes the following possible. Thus you can send me messages with confidence that only I can read them.