From the course: Ethical Hacking: Cryptography

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Symmetric cryptography, continued

Symmetric cryptography, continued

From the course: Ethical Hacking: Cryptography

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Symmetric cryptography, continued

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- [Instructor] The other limitation of symmetric cryptography was the number of key requirements. Let's say we have a small organization of seven people and they all want to communicate with each other. Using the equation we established earlier, let's plug in the number 7 for N. The result is that we'll need 21 unique keys in order for all seven people to communicate with each other. That doesn't sound quite so bad. Well, until you think about scaling it to a size of a larger organization. What if we had 10,000 people? So that's not many, right? Well, it's the size of a typical medium to large organization. Well, shockingly, that's almost 50 million unique keys needed. Here's a table that will give you an idea of just how crazy it can get. Depending on your industry, especially in the healthcare field where I work, an organization size can be near or over 100,000 employees, which would require 5 billion unique keys. That's out of control. You might be thinking, why on earth would I…

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