Secure Programming Cookbook for C and C++

Chapter 7. Public Key Cryptography

Warning

Many of the recipes in this chapter are too low-level for general-purpose use. We recommend that you first try to find what you need in Chapter 9 before resorting to building solutions yourself. If you do use this chapter, please be careful, read all of our warnings, and do consider the higher-level constructs we suggest.

Public key cryptography offers a number of important advantages over traditional, or symmetric, cryptography:

Key agreement

Traditional cryptography is done with a single shared key. There are obvious limitations to that kind of cryptography, though. The biggest one is the key agreement problem: how do two parties that wish to communicate do so securely? One option is to use a more secure out-of-band medium for transport, such as telephone or postal mail. Such a solution is rarely practical, however, considering that we might want to do business securely with an online merchant we’ve never previously encountered. Public key cryptography can help solve the key agreement problem, although doing so is not as easy as one might hope. We touch upon this issue throughout this chapter and expand upon it in Chapter 8.

Digital signatures

Another useful service that public key cryptography can provide is digital signatures, which allow for message integrity checks without a shared secret. In a symmetric environment with message authentication codes (MACs) for message authentication, a user can determine that someone with the MAC key ...