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well, while the response talks about encryption in general it does not address the core of my question. Why would a libray offering both encryption algorithms make it more difficult to persist one key while providing methods to save the other one relatively easily?
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well, while the response talks about encryption in general it does not address the core of my question. Why would a libray offering both encryption algorithms make it more difficult to persist one key while providing methods to save the other one relatively easily?

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I am using POCO libraries for encryption. While the class RSAKey has methods for saving the key, the class CipherKey representing a symmetric key does not have any straight forward methods to persist the key. All that the class offers is a getKey method which returns a vector&lt;BYTE&gt;. Also, I need to get the Initialization vector so I can recreate a CipherKey as needed. Why does it have to be so complex? Why this difference between RSA and symmetric keys? A symmetric key is not expected to be persisted? How do the other libraries work?
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I am using POCO libraries for encryption. While the class RSAKey has methods for saving the key, the class CipherKey representing a symmetric key does not have any straight forward methods to persist the key. All that the class offers is a getKey method which returns a vector<BYTE>. Also, I need to get the Initialization vector so I can recreate a CipherKey as needed. Why does it have to be so complex? Why this difference between RSA and symmetric keys? A symmetric key is not expected to be persisted? How do the other libraries work?

symmetric key vs RSA key

C++ is an intermediate-level general-purpose programming language, not to be confused with C or C#. It was developed as a set of extensions to the C programming language to improve type-safety and add support for automatic resource management, object-orientation, generic programming, and exception handling, among other features.

An algorithm is a self-contained step-by-step set of operations to be performed. Algorithms exist that perform calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning. Starting from an initial state and initial input (perhaps empty), the instructions describe a computation that, when executed, proceeds through a finite number of well-defined successive states, eventually producing "output" and terminating at a final ending state. The transition from one state to the next is not necessarily deterministic; some algorithms, known as randomized algorithms, incorporate random input.