On Thu, 12 Oct 2000, Dr S N Henson wrote:
> As has been indicated RSA is not suitable for bulk encryption. You
> typically use RSA to encrypt a secret symmetric key and use the
> symmetric algorithm for bulk encryption.
It might even be unsuitable. As the author of the original encryption
program (Phil Zimmermann, Oct 94) wrote about PGP:
"Not only is RSA too slow to use on bulk data, but it even has certain
weaknesses that can be exploited in some special cases of particular
kinds of messages that are fed to the RSA cipher, even for large
keys."
After six years the documentation for PGP is still one of the best
introductions to cryptography. It should be required reading.
http://d-n-s.com/support/pgpdoc1.txt
http://d-n-s.com/support/pgpdoc2.txt
Amanda.
