Sunday, December 20, 2015

Symmetric/Asymmetric Encryption and Hashing

I use the following simple formula to distinguish among symmetric/asymmetric encryption and hashing.

C = Enc (P, K1)
P = Dec (C, K2)

Where
C is cypher text,
P is plain text,
Enc is an encryption algorithm,
Dec is an decryption algorithm,
K1 is a key for encryption.
K2 is a key for decryption.

If K1 == K2, then Enc and Dec are symmetric encryption (e.g., AES).

If K1 != K2, then Enc and Dec are asymmetric encryption (e.g., RSA).

If Enc is an one-way function (there is not a Dec to recover C to P), we can call it hashing (e.g., SHA).

No comments:

Post a Comment