Applied Cryptography in .NET and Azure Key Vault pp 143-168 | Cite as
Key Storage and Azure Key Vault
Abstract
In previous chapters, we built a sophisticated encryption example that had the ability to use symmetric encryption to encrypt our data while protecting the symmetric encryption keys utilizing an RSA public and private key pair. While symmetric encryption is fast and efficient, moving the keys between multiple parties is very hard to achieve safely; this is why we use RSA to encrypt the symmetric key. The key is encrypted using the recipient’s public key (which can be known by anyone) and is then decrypted using the recipients private key (which only they know).