[Cryptography] Why prefer symmetric crypto over public key crypto?
Christian Huitema
huitema at huitema.net
Sat Sep 7 23:06:53 EDT 2013
> Pairwise shared secrets are just about the only thing that scales worse than public key distribution by way of PGP key fingerprints on business cards. > The equivalent of CAs in an all-symmetric world is KDCs. Instead of having the power to enable an active attack on you today, KDCs have the power
> to enable a passive attack on you forever. If we want secure crypto that can be used by everyone, with minimal trust, public key is the only way to do it.
I am certainly not going to advocate Internet-scale KDC. But what if the application does not need to scale more than a "network of friends?"
-- Christian Huitema
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