Which of the following is not a weakness of symmetric cryptography?
A.
Limited security
B.
Key distribution
C.
Speed
D.
Scalability
Explanation:
In secret key cryptography, a single key is used for both encryption and decryption. The sender uses
the key (or some set of rules) to encrypt the plaintext and sends the cipher text to the receiver. The
receiver applies the same key (or rule set) to decrypt the message and recover the plaintext.
Because a single key is used for both functions, secret key cryptography is also called symmetric
encryption. With this form of cryptography, it is obvious that the key must be known to both the
sender and the receiver; that, in fact, is the secret. The biggest difficulty with this approach, of
course, is the distribution of the key. Symmetric encryption is around 1000 times faster than
Asymmetric encryption, the second is commonly used just to encrypt the keys for Symmetric
Cryptography.