Digital Signatures

So, a private key and a public key can be used for simple message encryption and decryption. This ensures that the message can not be read (as in eavesdropping) but, it does not ensure that the message has not been tampered with. For this, a one-way hash (a number of fixed length that is unique for the data to be hashed) is used to generate a digital signature. A digital signature is basically data that has been encrypted using a one-way hash and the signer's private key. To validate the integrity of the data, the server receiving the communication uses the signer's public key to decrypt the hash. It then uses the same hashing algorithm that generated the original hash (sent with the digital signature) to generate a new one-way hash of the same data. Finally, the new hash and the received hash are compared. If the two hashes match, the data has not changed since it was signed and the recipient can be certain that the public key used to decrypt the digital signature corresponds to the private key used to create the digital signature. If they don't match, the data may have been tampered with since it was signed, or the signature may have been created with a private key that doesn't correspond to the public key presented by the signer. This interaction ensures that any change in the data, even deleting or altering a single character, results in a different value.