Asymmetric key encryption
The following section describes the flow for using an asymmetric key to encrypt and decrypt data. Asymmetric key encryptions involve a key pair (public and private key pair). As the name suggests, the private key is not shared while the public key is shared. There are two participants in this workflow—a sender and a recipient. The sender creates a ciphertext using the recipient’s public key, and then the recipient decrypts the ciphertext using the private key it holds. Only someone with knowledge of the private key can decrypt the ciphertext.
Cloud KMS provides the following functionality as it relates to asymmetric encryption:
- The ability to create an asymmetric key with the key purpose of
ASYMMETRIC_DECRYPT. For information about which algorithms Cloud KMS supports, see asymmetric encryption algorithms in the Google Cloud documentation. - CloudKMS asymmetric keys also support
ASYMMETRIC_SIGN(ECC and RSA). - The ability to retrieve...
