Developing Secure Applications with Visual Basic

Exporting and Importing Keys

The last piece of information that you need to know before you can launch into building applications that use public/private key pairs is how to exchange encryption keys with another user. You need to be able to exchange both public and session keys. The key to exchanging is through exporting and importing keys.

When you export a key, it is translated into a series of ASCII-printable characters that are easily passed to another user. When these keys are imported, they are converted back into the binary series of numbers that make up the original key. In addition, keys can be encrypted during the export using the recipient's public key, ensuring that the recipient is the only user who can import the key. You therefore ...