Book Image

OpenStack Cloud Security

By : Fabio Alessandro Locati
Book Image

OpenStack Cloud Security

By: Fabio Alessandro Locati

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (14 chapters)
OpenStack Cloud Security
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Asymmetric encryption


Asymmetric encryption has some core differences from symmetric encryption. The first that you can immediately see is that in asymmetric encryption there are two keys: one public key to encrypt and a private key to decrypt. From this concept, one of the names of asymmetric encryption is derived: public key encryption. The process in an exchange of secure data with an asymmetric encryption is as seen here:

This approach does simplify greatly the key exchange and key management. For the key management, you only need a pair of keys (private/public) for each person. So if you have 20 people that have to communicate between themselves, you'll only need 20 pairs of keys. For the key exchange process, it becomes very easy since every user can share their public key online, and you only have to have the other person's public key to encrypt the message.

Also, asymmetric encryption allows you to sign messages, encrypting them with your private key, so that anyone with your private...