CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cryptographypublic-key-encryptionencryption-asymmetric
Nadendla
Nadendla

Reputation: 722

Can we have multple private Keys with single public key?

I am encrypting data with public key and decrypting data with private key.

Is there a possibility of having multiple private keys with a single public key?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 7090

Answers (3)

viper
viper

Reputation: 734

Its not feasible to make multiple private keys from one public key. First a key is generated which will be your private key. The public key pair is generated from this private key. Only one public key can be generated from one key. Here is a simple command to generate public key using RSA algorithm

rsa -in <yourkeyname(private key)> -pubout -out <publickeyname>

Upvotes: 0

dharr
dharr

Reputation: 328

No you cant that is an essence of Public Private key encryption. Why do u want to have multiple private keys for a single public key? What if u want to sign an encrypted file? If that would be possible I would be able to send encrypted file to your friends and sign it with my crafted private key?

Upvotes: 1

Thilo
Thilo

Reputation: 262794

I suppose in theory it depends on the algorithm.

But with the ones we generally use (RSA, ECC), there is a 1:1 correspondence, so: no.

Not having a 1:1 correspondence seems like a bad thing. After all, you want to know that only a specified person can be the sender/recipient.

If you want group conversations, this is usually done by encrypting the message with a symmetric session key (you'd do that anyway in all likelihood, because public-key-crypto does not scale well for large messages), and then encrypting the session key (separately) for multiple recipients.

Upvotes: 0

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