Full Stack Python Security

5 Asymmetric encryption

This chapter covers

• Introducing the key-distribution problem
• Demonstrating asymmetric encryption with the cryptography package
• Ensuring nonrepudiation with digital signatures

In the previous chapter, you learned how to ensure confidentiality with symmetric encryption. Symmetric encryption, unfortunately, is no panacea. By itself, symmetric encryption is unsuitable for key distribution, a classic problem in cryptography. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to solve this problem with asymmetric encryption. Along the way, you’ll learn more about the Python package named cryptography. Finally, I’ll show you how to ensure nonrepudiation with digital signatures.

5.1 Key-distribution problem

Symmetric encryption works great ...