Everyone, including the mailman, can read your postcard. Behind the scenes, the Hush encryption engine scrambles electronic information using 1,024 bits of randomly generated numbers. With Hush encryption, users create their own pass phrases, and a secure Hush server does the rest. What the public key locks, the private key unlocks. The recipient's public key is used to encrypt the message key.
Encryption is here to stay.
It will be more accessible to the everyday user, and faster than people expect. HushMail is World Wide Web-based, using the Java programming language. The approach, while different in certain key ways from a related technique known as public key infrastructure, or PKI, nonetheless illustrates the power of encryption to secure and protect Internet transactions and communication. In establishing a series of public and private keys, or mathematically related constructs that users would employ to authenticate the legitimacy of transactions, a fully implemented encryption system applied to all software would make anonymous or false-identity computer assaults extremely difficult, if not impossible. While theoretically hackable, deciphering the keys would require calculations of such complexity and length as to make the task impractical for the foreseeable future.