The comparisons between public key and symmetric key cryptography in protecting storage systems

As public key cryptographic operations are computationally expensive; it motivates a careful examination of the reasons of its usage and looking for symmetric key alternatives. In this paper, we present comparisons between public key and symmetric key cryptography in protecting storage and take some other factors, such as security, cost and environment etc. into consideration. At first, the comparisons between public key and symmetric key cryptography is presented. Then, the security services that some famous storage systems provide and some symmetric key alternatives are discussed. We give the comparisons of some practice storage systems and trade off some other parameters. Finally, some general conclusions are made about the secure storage systems for system designers.