An cryptographic scheme which uses two mathematically related keys; a public and a private key where a message encrypted with public key can only be decrypted with the private key and vice-versa.
The most important element of public key encryption is that the public and private keys are related in such a way that only the public key can be used to encrypt a message and only the matching private key can be used to decrypt it. In addition, it is practically impossible to derive the private key with only the knowledge of the public key. Public-key systems such as PGP, SSL and many others benefit from this mathematically well-defined behavior of public key encryption. It is important to note that public key encryption is mostly called asymmetric encryption because it uses two keys instead of one key as opposed to symmetric encryption.
