The most practical use for asymmetric keys is to encrypt (sign) a small amount of data. While they may in theory be used to encrypt large amounts of data, asymmetric keys are typically several of orders of magnitude slower than symmetric keys. Protocols like SSL/TLS use asymmetric keys to securely exchange a one-time symmetric key (aka "session" key) which is then used to do the data encryption in both directions.
PGP, S/MIME, and CMS (RFC-2630) all create a symmetric session key to encrypt data, and then only encrypt the session key with the asymmetric key. This is probably the approach that you would want to take to encrypt data using asymmetric key pairs. Kirk Wolf Dovetailed Technologies http://dovetail.com On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 2:31 PM, Henrique Seganfredo < [email protected]> wrote: > Hello folks, > > I am posting this one from office. > > I am doing some ICSF programming reasearch and figured out that the subset > of PKA functions that allow me to cipher or decipher using assimetric keys > are > quite limited due the data length that can be supplied. > > By example, the CSNDPKE function encrypts the supplied parameter 'keyvalue' > which size is given with the variable 'keyvalue_length'. This variable has > a > maximum field size of 256 bytes. > > So I assume that I may only do assimetric encription with small data > chunks. > Is that right? There is no other possibility? > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO > Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
