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And one part that is often forgotten: How to authenticate the other side. Without authentication asymmetric encryption is still useless, because someone could

by t0mas88 10y ago

And one part that is often forgotten: How to authenticate the other side. Without authentication asymmetric encryption is still useless, because someone could man-in-the-middle your key exchange, swap out the public key that is sent both ways and make either side think they now have a secure channel with each other while in reality they have a secure channel with the man in the middle. So the challenge is that they'll need some equivalent of what in the HTTPS world would be a Certificate Authority. For which you'll have the same kind of update/upgrade path questions that you very rightfully ask for the key lengths.

ChuckMcM 10y ago
Very true. Early on in Java's gestation I was building into it a full capabilities system for security. One of the challenges of loading classes which provided export proscribed encryption capability was having the JVM authenticate the class, and having the class authenticate the JVM it was being loaded in to. Of course not all situations need that, but understanding what the endpoints are trying to achieve and how that objective could be compromised by an attacker will inform on which identities must be established, and to whom, in order to achieve that objective.