It looks like more than one person needs to bone up on cryptography.
Public-key algorithms like RSA are typically 2 or 3 orders of magnitude
slower than symmetric algorithms like DES or IDEA. That's why packages
like PGP use IDEA for encrypting the message, and RSA only to encrypt
the message digest and session key. RSA is not even close to useful for
stream encryption without expensive specialized hardware to do it.
> really kuznet@ms2.inr.ac.ru graced my mailbox with this long sought knowledge:
> > Kevin M Bealer (kmb203@psu.EDU) wrote:
> >
> > : Ergo DES is compromised,
> >
> > DES is very old method, it is considered weak for breaking
> > by brute force, but seems it has no back doors.
> >
> > Alexey Kuznetsov.