An Overview and Analysis of Hybrid Encryption: The Combination of Symmetric Encryption and Asymmetric Encryption

Abstract

In the current scenario, various forms of information are spread everywhere, especially through the Internet. A lot of valuable information is contained in the dissemination, so security issues have always attracted attention. With the emergence of cryptographic algorithms, information security has been further improved. Generally, cryptography encryption is divided into symmetric encryption and asymmetric encryption. Although symmetric encryption has a very fast computation speed and is beneficial to encrypt a large amount of data, the security is not as high as asymmetric encryption. The same pair of keys used in symmetric algorithms leads to security threats. Thus, if the key can be protected, the security could be improved. Using an asymmetric algorithm to protect the key and encrypting the message with a symmetric algorithm would be a good choice. This paper will review security issues in the information transmission and the method of hybrid encryption algorithms that will be widely used in the future. Also, the various characteristics of algorithms in different systems and some typical cases of hybrid encryption will be reviewed and analyzed to showcase the reinforcement by combining algorithms. Hybrid encryption algorithms will improve the security of the transmission without causing more other problems. Additionally, the way how the encryption algorithms combine to strength the security will be discussed with the aid of an example.