Asymmetric (public-key) cryptography is frequently used to protect the confidentiality of e-mail and web traffic. Which of the following statements BEST explains how asymmetric encryption achieves this confidentiality during data transmission?
Data is split across redundant drives so that no single drive stores the entire plaintext.
A single shared secret key is exchanged over a secure channel and used for both encryption and decryption.
The sender encrypts the data with the recipient's public key, ensuring that only the corresponding private key can decrypt the message.
The sender signs the data with their private key so that anyone with the public key can decrypt and read it.
With asymmetric encryption, the sender uses the recipient's public key to encrypt the data. Only the holder of the mathematically related private key can decrypt that ciphertext, so confidentiality is preserved even if the encrypted traffic is intercepted. In contrast, symmetric encryption relies on a single shared secret key (Answer 1), digital signatures created with a sender's private key provide integrity and authentication-not confidentiality (Answer 3), and striping data across drives (Answer 4) is a storage redundancy technique unrelated to encryption.
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What are public and private keys in asymmetric encryption?
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How does asymmetric encryption differ from symmetric encryption?
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