My eyes kinda glazed over everytime I tried to study that domain but
here's my thoughts...
I tend to think of PGP as asymemetric-only crypto, maybe a better
example is something like SSH or SSL - you are presented with the
entity's public key (certificate) when connecting, and the actual
session is encrypted using symmetric crypto.
Per wikipedia (couldn't get to netscape's official page), SSL uses:
# Public-key encryption-based key exchange and certificate-based
authentication
# Symmetric cipher-based traffic encryption
ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Sockets_Layer for more
information.
HTH,
Jeff
CISSP, CISA
--- In CISSP-Discuss@yahoogroups.com, "subbarau_2004"
<subbarau_2004@y...> wrote:
Hello,
In Cryptography (from Passport book), there is the hybrid approach to
achieve key distribution and scalability. Under the hybrid approach,
the symmetric algorithm encrypts the message AND the asymmetric
algorithm encrypts the symmetric key.
For the above concept, I would like to use PGP or OpenPGP to
understand the point better. If I am encrypting a message to my
collegue with his public key:
- Is the symmetric key generated on the fly which encrypt the message?
I use GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) for personal use. When I generate a
key, the option I select is the default selection.
(1) DSA and ElGamal (default)
(2) DSA (sign only)
(4) RSA (sign only)
All the above choices are either public key algorithms or key exchange
algorithms or digital signature algorithms. I did not see any
symmetric algorithm choices such as 3DES, Blowfish etc. Now, how do I
know which symmetric algorithm is being used to encrypt the message to
my collegue?
I hope I have not overloaded this question.
Thank you for any explanation.
Regards,
Subbarao
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