-----Original Message-----
From: Wade L. Scholine [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, December 13, 2002 3:28 AM
To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'
Subject: RE:Compared to symmetric ciphers, asymmetric ciphers tend to be very slow. Typically asymmetric ciphers are used to encrypt a few tens of bytes of data, to protect a key for a symmetric cipher session, or to prove that user of the asymmetric cipher knows some secret.
RSA is a block cipher with a block size equal to the key size (a little smaller, actually). Typical key sizes these days are 1024 or 2048 bits (128 or 256 bytes). Common RSA applications (for example SSL) involve using it to encrypt one or a few blocks.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: sharun santhosh [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Thursday, December 12, 2002 4:43 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject:
>
>
> I am new to this and have read somewhere that public
> key algorithms are inappropriate for encrypting
> 'large' amounts of data.
> How large is large?
>
> thanks
>
Title: RE:
To Add
more to the Scholine's comments below,
S/MIME
is also one more example. The Assymetric ciphers are used to encrypt the
symmetric session keys.
Murali
