Question

ASSIGNMENT This is a short paper that requires you to study the provided scenario, research its questions/problems, and provide analysis and recommendations. SCENARIO ABC Institute of Research has sensitive information that needs to be protected from its rivals. The Institute has collaborated with XYZ Inc. to research genetics but does not want to share other research projects. These other projects must be kept confidential at any cost. ABC researchers are unsure about the form of crypto algorithm (asymmetric or symmetric) to use to protect their intellectual property. Compare these two forms of cryptography. Formulate a possible solution to the problem and describe the advantages and disadvantages of any solution employed .

Answer 1

So basically there two crytographic algorithm

1. Symmetric Cryptography: In this two parties having communication share a common key between them for encryption and decryption.
2. Asymmetric Cryptography: In this both parties uses their separate public key and private key for encryption and decryption of the message.

Let's first see a complete difference charts between these two approaches.

Now coming to question Since ABC institute wants to protect their informations from rivals and even from those with whom it is working in collaboration like XYZ Inc.

So if ABC uses symmetric encryption then it will have the same key shared between itself and XYZ for communicating details and similarly for every other organization it is working under collaboration, it has to kept a secret for each one of them which could take upto n*(n-1)/2 secret keys for n collaborating institute with ABC . Having this much key then also one collaborating organization can attack on ABC other data by getting a secret key from some other collaborating organization.

On the other hand if it uses Asymmetric Cryptography then ABC don't need to have separate keys for every collaborating organization because now ABC can send it's data to any other organization using public key of that organization and now if any other organization sends any inormation to ABC then they only can use public key of ABC.

So if there is any data with ABC which it doesn't want to share with anyone can be encrypted using private key of ABC and nobody other than ABC posses this private key so nobody can decrypt it.

Only disadvantage with this Asymmetric scheme is that it involves huge computation for large data but since provided that ABC wants to protect its data at any cost, So I think this approach is better.