When RSA is better than ECC...

Consider this scenario. You are a reporter visiting a dodgy country to interview some dissidents. You bring your Laptop with you, and you want some encryption software to encrypt your interviews.

Now if the authorities catch you, they will not hesitate to beat any secret keys out of you, and then arrest and maybe torture and kill the dissidents.

A feasible solution is to place an RSA public key on the hard drive, and leave the private key at home in your own country. As you record your interview notes they are encrypted on-the-fly using the RSA public key. There are no secrets required. When you get back home safe you can decrypt them.

Note that hybrid encryption won't work here (not easily anyway)- the data must be encrypted using RSA directly. If using ECC only much smaller blocks of data could be encrypted each time, and with much greater computational effort. With care an RSA exponent of 3 can be used.

Does anyone know of such a product?


Mike Scott
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: When RSA is better than ECC...
    ... interview some dissidents. ... You bring your Laptop with you, and you want some encryption software to encrypt your interviews. ... Now if the authorities catch you, they will not hesitate to beat any secret keys out of you, and then arrest and maybe torture and kill the dissidents. ...
    (sci.crypt)
  • Re: When RSA is better than ECC...
    ... interview some dissidents. ... Now if the authorities catch you, they will not hesitate to beat any secret keys out of you, and then arrest and maybe torture and kill the dissidents. ... If you are worried about the temporary existence of the symmetric key in memory, at the beginning of the encryption process the plaintext will be in memory, easier to just grab that, and see my earlier graveyard comment. ...
    (sci.crypt)
  • Re: When RSA is better than ECC...
    ... interview some dissidents. ... interview notes they are encrypted on-the-fly using the RSA public key. ... If you get caught with encryption software, ...
    (sci.crypt)
  • Re: When RSA is better than ECC...
    ... some encryption software to encrypt your interviews. ... secret keys out of you, and then arrest and maybe torture and kill the ... interview notes they are encrypted on-the-fly using the RSA public key. ...
    (sci.crypt)
  • Re: When RSA is better than ECC...
    ... You are a reporter visiting a dodgy country to ... interview some dissidents. ... interview notes they are encrypted on-the-fly using the RSA public key. ...
    (sci.crypt)