On Fri, 24 Jan 2003 08:04:41 +0100, =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Andre_Mari=EBn?= said: > It may be just me, but I am getting confused. > If we keep both private and public key secret, > why not use plain old symmetric cryptography? If the front-end box is compromised, the attacker holds all the keys that are active on that box. If you're using symmetric crypto, the attacker can easily decrypt the data (for instance, if he finds it left lying around on the disk, or taps the communication channel, etc). if you use some asymmetric scheme, they can't use the key they have gotten to decrypt.
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