Solaris™ 8 Advanced System Administrator's Guide, Third Edition

Example: Diffie-Hellman

For example, user A wants to exchange a lot of data with user B on another system but wants to encrypt all of it as it passes over the network. Ultimately, both users want to use symmetric encryption for speed but don't want to pass the secret key over the network link. User A and user B have each other's public keys. User A can create a secret symmetric key and encrypt it with user B's public key. He then transmits the encrypted secret key to user B. User B uses his password-protected private key (which he has to unprotect with its password each time he uses it) to decrypt the incoming secret key. Now users A and B both have the secret symmetric key and can start a symmetric encryption session. Notice that they used asymmetric ...