Timeline for Why not use symmetric encryption?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Dec 19, 2014 at 9:37 | comment | added | Peter | @JeanHominal The site can do both. But my experiments with several people have shown me that non-technical people can’t handle asymmetric encryption, and even getting them to use symmetric encryption properly is a struggle. (I had to give up on having people use Diffie-Hellmen to devise a symmetric key and look for other semi-safe methods of sharing the key – hence my discovery of onetimesecret.) | |
| Dec 18, 2014 at 14:58 | comment | added | Jean Hominal | @Peter: As far as I see, the site you linked is asymmetric encryption - Alice creates a key pair and sends the public part to people who wish to send him messages, and Bob uses the public key to create messages that only Alice can decrypt. So, it appears that asymmetric encryption can be made simple enough for your purpose. | |
| Dec 18, 2014 at 14:53 | comment | added | Peter | @JeanHominal This is the best I have found to date: prgomez.com/ursa | |
| Dec 18, 2014 at 14:46 | comment | added | Jean Hominal | @Peter: "simple system of encryption which we can all understand" You will have to tell us which system fulfills this criterion - do you think that, for example, Triple DES, which is a symmetric algorithm, fulfills it? | |
| Dec 18, 2014 at 10:21 | comment | added | Peter | @Xander For me my person-to-person email is not trivial, and I guess many others feel the same about their email correspondence. What I need to communicate with my non-technologically minded correspondents is a simple system of encryption which we can all understand. | |
| Dec 18, 2014 at 0:27 | comment | added | cpast | @Xander Person-to-person messages are a fairly important use case, and this would work for any kind of person-to-person message. The main issue isn't that it doesn't work for human-to-machine communication, it's that you have to have different keys for everybody. | |
| Dec 17, 2014 at 19:50 | comment | added | Xander | @Peter Then I'd suggest that you've restricted yourself to a particularly trivial use case and the solution proposed is not generally applicable beyond that use case. So, you've solved a problem that doesn't exist in practice. | |
| Dec 17, 2014 at 12:09 | comment | added | Peter | I’m only talking about person-to-person email. Don’t need encrypted email with 1000 people – under 20 people. Saving keys is easy in an encrypted text file. (1000 private keys would not actually be a problem) We can “delete” (i.e. render unreadable to everyone) old messages by deleting the keys and agreeing new ones with the correspondent. | |
| Dec 17, 2014 at 11:51 | history | answered | Thomas Pornin | CC BY-SA 3.0 |