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by magospietato 1680 days ago
The most common asymmetric encryption algorithm (RSA) can only encrypt a plaintext of limited size. Depending on padding scheme, a 2048 bit RSA key can encrypt a message of up to ~245 bytes.

Typically to securely encrypt a message you use symmetric key encryption. Then to allow a third party to decrypt that message, you encrypt the symmetric key using the third party's asymmetric key.

1 comments

AES can only encrypt a limited size too