Overview#

Diffie-Hellman or RSA The situation can be confused, so let's set things right.

RSA is two algorithms, one for Asymmetric Key Cryptography, and one for Digital Signatures.

Asymmetric Key Cryptography and Key-Exchange are somewhat equivalent.

Using Asymmetric Key Cryptography, you can do a Key-Exchange by virtue of generating a random Symmetric Key (a bunch of random bytes) and perform Encryption that with the recipient's Public Key.

Conversely, you can do Asymmetric Key Cryptography with Key-Exchange by using the key resulting from the Key-Exchange to perform Encryption using a Symmetric Key Cryptography.

Diffie-Hellman key-exchange#

Diffie-Hellman key-exchange is a one-roundtrip Key-Exchange algorithm:

• Bob sends his half ("DH public key")
• Alice computes his half, obtains the key, encrypts, sends the whole lot to the Bob
• Alice computes the key, decrypts.

This is compatible with a one-shot communication system, assuming a pre-distribution of the public key.

An advantage of Diffie-Hellman over RSA for generating Ephemeral Keys. Generating a new Diffie-Hellman a new Ephemeral Key key pair is extremely fast (provided that some "DH parameters", i.e. the Diffie-Hellman Group into which DH is computed, are reused, which does not entail extra risks, as far as we know). This is not a really big issue for big servers, because a very busy TLS server could generate a new "ephemeral" RSA key pair every ten seconds for a very small fraction of his computing power, and keep it in RAM only, and for only ten seconds, which would be enough for Perfect Forward Secrecy.

Regardless, RSA Ephemeral Key has fallen out of fashion, and, more importantly, out of standardization. In the context of TLS, if you want Perfect Forward Secrecy, you need to use Diffie-Hellman Ephemeral, because that's what is defined and supported by existing TLS implementations.

Diffie-Hellman is a Key-Exchange algorithm.

RSA key-exchange and Diffie-Hellman key-exchange#

So as RSA key-exchange and Diffie-Hellman key-exchange are the same Functions. The functions are done differently even though the outcome is the same.

Since these algorithms don't do the same thing, you could prefer one over the other depending on the usage context.

Summary#

You will usually prefer RSA over Diffie-Hellman, or Diffie-Hellman over RSA, based on interoperability constraints: one will be more supported than the other, depending on the context. Performance rarely matters (at least not as much as is often assumed). For SSL, you'll want Diffie-Hellman because it is actually Diffie-Hellman Ephemeral, and the "E" (as ephemeral) is nice to have, because of Perfect Forward Secrecy.

TLS 1.3 has dropped support for RSA key-exchange due to the lack of support for Perfect Forward Secrecy

Diffie-Hellman Ephemeral provides Authentication for both Alice and Bob where RSA by default only provides Authorization for Alice

More Information#

There might be more information for this subject on one of the following:

• Key-Exchange