Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) is a data encoding property that ensures the integrity of a session key in the event that a long-term key is compromised. PFS accomplishes this by enforcing the derivation of a new key for each and every session.
Perfect Forward Secrecy works on a very simple concept to ensure the safety of session keys from being exploited by hackers in the future. Encoded messages are encrypted using sophisticated mathematical formulas that would require massive amount of processing to decrypt -- practically impossible to build using the current computing architecture. However, a hacker could theoretically save an encrypted message with the intent to decrypt it in the future, perhaps when greater computing power is available. PFS is designed to eliminate this threat by periodically creating new keys. So, even if a hacker exploits a private key in future, he will not be able to decrypt messages transmitted in the past.
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