AES encryption, what are public and private keys?
In AES encryption (.net framework), how are the public and private keys used? Are the public and private keys combined to form a full key, and then the algorithm uses the public + private key to encrypt the data? (simplified keys used below for example purposes) e.g. public key = 12345 private key = 67890 so the key used when generating the encryption result is: 1234567890 As others have said, AES is a symmetric algorithm ( private-key cryptography ). This involves a single key which is a shared secret between the sender and recipient. An analogy is a locked mailbox without a mail slot.