On Thu, 29 Dec 2005, Kevin Till wrote:
>   Another point I want to add is that while public-key encryption allows  you
> to encrypt the data with just the public-key and store away the private-key.
> It does requires more computational resources, thus much slower than
> symmetric encryption.

Computational resources don't matter that much: most systems generate a
symmetric session key, which is encrypted using the public key. Hence the slow
part is limited to the encryption of the session key, while the actual data is
encrypted using the fast symmetric algorithm.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                                                Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert AT linux-m68k 
DOT org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                                            -- Linus Torvalds