Your source for the most up-to-date terms, definitions, and acronyms for and about internet service providers.
Search for an ISP term
digital envelope
Last modified: Thursday, April 24, 1997
A type of security that uses two layers of encryption to protect a message. First, the message itself is encoded using symmetric encryption, and then the key to decode the message is encrypted using public-key encryption. This technique overcomes one of the problems of public-key encryption, which is that it is slower than symmetric encryption. Because only the key is protected with public-key encryption, there is very little overhead.
