Today I Learned

hashrocket A Hashrocket project

Size of RSA encrypted content

RSA encryption (publickey/privatekey) is powerful encryption but its really only meant to encrypt small things like other encryption keys. The maximum size of the amount of data an rsa public key can encrypt is:

(key_size/8).floor - 11

So in the case of a key thats 1024 bits it can only encrypt data up to 117 bytes long. Not long enough for documents of any size or variable length.

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