Question

The Question: Cryptography is behind the scenes of much of the security of the internet. These questions get at some of the key details of modern cryptography.

Please answer the following questions briefly (and in your own words):

a.) In your own words, define symmetric key cryptography and public key cryptography?

b.) Which is more efficient for encoding and decoding large amounts of data to transmit securely between two parties?

c.) Which of the two cryptography methods is more naturally used for digital signatures?

Answer 1

a)Symmetric key cryptography - Symmetric ciphers use the same cryptographic keys for both encryption of plain text and decryption of cipher text. The involved parties share that key, password, or passphrase, and they can use it to decrypt or encrypt any messages they want. example-stream ciphers, block ciphers.

public key cryptography- uses two keys to encrypt and decrypt a plain text. The public key is used to encrypt and the private key is used to decrypt,The guiding principle is that messages intended for a specific person should be encrypted using their public key in such a way that the message can only be decrypted through the use of the corresponding private key. example -RSA, DSA, Elliptic curve techniques

b)Symmetric key cryptography is more efficient for encoding and decoding large amounts of data to transmit securely between two parties.

c)public key cryptography is the best for digital signatures.