[Chicago] encrypting 5gb files?

[Tim Gebhardt]

On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 1:37 PM, Tim Saylor <tim.saylor at gmail.com> wrote:

> In general speed is the enemy of security in encryption.  The faster you
> can encrypt/decrypt the file, the faster someone can crack it.
>
>
This is not true at all.  AES is much more secure than 3DES and AES is
usually way faster to encrypt/decrypt.

If you want to use asymmetric encryption then RSA is fine and symmetric
encryption I'd recommend AES.

In general, asymmetric is a lot slower than symmetric encryption.  In fact,
a common technique for encrypting a file is to encrypt the file with a
symmetric algorithm, wrap the file in some sort of an envelop and include
the ENCRYPTED symmetric key that's been encrypted with an asymmetric key:

envelop:
    data_key (encrypted with RSA key)
    data (encrypted with data_key)

But if you're not very familiar with cryptography it might be best to leave
it to the experts:
http://www.truecrypt.org/

It's very easy to get crypto wrong.

-Tim Gebhardt
tim at gebhardtcomputing.com
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