Symmetric/Asymmetric Encryption and Digital Signatures
Learn about the fundamentals of symmetric and asymmetric encryption in distributed systems. Understand how intractable problems underpin public-key cryptography, key exchange methods like Diffie-Hellman, and the use of digital signatures for data integrity. This lesson equips you to grasp essential security mechanisms important for protecting distributed applications.
As we have already explained, symmetric cryptography is mainly based on randomization. On the other hand, asymmetric cryptography does not rely only on randomization because it allows an easy computation in the forward direction (e.g., generating the key pair), but makes the inverse computation extremely hard (e.g. discovering the private key from the ...